LYDIA HAD SEEN THE BRACELET AND SHRUNK FROM IT.
The line of inquiry was not permitted, the bracelet was not put in evidence, the question was ordered stricken from the records; but the total effect of her testimony was to leave in the minds of the jurors the impression that she was perfectly capable of the conduct which the prosecution attributed to her. Wiley detained her a few moments for redirect examination in the hope of regaining the dove, but in vain.
Miss Bennett was put on the stand to testify to Lydia's habitual prudence as a driver; Governor Albee testified to her excellent record; half a dozen other friends were persuasive, but could not undo the harm she had done her own case.
The district attorney put the telephone-company records in evidence, showing that only one call had been made to the Bellington house between two and three o'clock March eleventh, and that it had been made at thirteen minutes before three.
CHAPTER XI
Lydia, with the wisdom that comes specially to the courageous, knew that her trial had gone against her as she left the stand. Miss Bennett was hopeful as they drove home. Bobby actually congratulated her on the clearness and weight of what she had said.
Albee, whose own investigation had closed brilliantly the day before, came that evening to say good-by to her. He was called back to his native state on business and was leaving on a midnight train.
Since the accident Lydia had been seeing Albee every day—had used him and consulted him, and yet had almost forgotten his existence. Now as she waited for his appearance it came to her with a shock of surprise that she had once come very near to engaging herself to him; that in parting like this for a few weeks he might make the assumption that she intended to be his wife. She thought she could make her trial a good excuse for refusing to consider such a proposal. That would get rid of him without hurting his feelings. She thought of the phrase, "A woman situated as I am cannot enter into an engagement." The mere idea of such a marriage was now intensely repugnant to her. How could she have contemplated it?
He entered, leonine yet neat in his double-breasted blue serge with a pearl in his black tie. He took her hand and beamed down upon her as if many things were in his heart that he would not trouble her with at this crisis by uttering.
"Ah, my dear," he said, "I wish I might be here to-morrow to see your triumph, but I'll be back in a month or so, and then—meantime I leave you in good hands. Wiley is capital. His summing up to-morrow will be a masterpiece. And remember, if by any chance—juries are chancy, you know—they do bring in an adverse verdict, on appeal you're safe as a church." He raised a cold, rigid little hand to his lips.
With her perfect clear-sightedness she saw he was deserting her and was glad to get him out of her way. She had not even an impulse to punish him for going.
The next morning it was raining torrents. It seemed as if the globe itself were spinning in rain rather than ether. Rain beat on the streets of New York so that the asphalt ran from curb to curb in black brooks; rain swept across the open spaces of the country, and as they ran through the storm water spouted in long streams from the wheels of the car. In the court room rain ran down the windows on each side of the American flag in liquid patterns. The court room itself had a different air. The electric lights were on, the air smelled of mud and rubber coats, and Judge Homans, who suffered from rheumatism, was stiff and grim.
A blow awaited Lydia at the outset. She had not understood that the defense summed up first—that the prosecution had the last word with the jury. What might not "that man" do with the jury by means of his hypnotic sincerity? She dreaded Wiley's summing up, too, fearing it would be oratorical—all the more because he kept disclaiming any such intention.
"The day has gone by for eloquence," he kept saying. "One doesn't attempt nowadays to be a Daniel Webster or a Rufus Choate. But of course it is necessary to touch the hearts of the jury."
She thought that O'Bannon's appeal was to their heads, and yet Wiley might be right. People were such geese they might prefer Wiley's method to O'Bannon's.
As soon as court opened Wiley began his summing up, and even his client approved of his simple, leisurely manner. He was very clear and effective with the merely legal points. The crime of manslaughter in the first degree—a crime for which a sentence of twenty years might be imposed—had not been proved. Nor was there credible evidence of criminal negligence, without which a verdict of manslaughter in the second degree could not be found. As he reviewed the facts he contrived to present a picture of Lydia's youthfulness, her motherlessness, of Thorne's early beginnings as a workingman, of his death leaving Lydia an orphan. He made her beauty and wealth seem a disadvantage—a terrible temptation to an ambitious young prosecutor with an eye to newspaper headlines. He made it appear as if juries always convicted young ladies of social position, but that this particular jury by a triumph of fair-mindedness were going to be able to overcome this prejudice. One juror who had wept over Alma Wooley now shed an impartial tear for Lydia.
"Gentlemen of the jury," Wiley ended, "I ask you to consider this case on the facts and the facts alone—not to be led away by the emotional appeals of an ambitious and learned young prosecutor who has the ruthlessness that so often goes with young ambition; not to convict an innocent girl whose only crime seems to be that she is the custodian of wealth that her father, an American workingman, won from the conditions of American industry. If you consider the evidence alone you will find that no crime has been committed. I ask you, gentlemen, for a verdict of not guilty."
Lydia, with her eyes slanted down to the red carpet at a spot a few feet from O'Bannon's chair, saw that Miss Bennett turned joyfully to Eleanor, that Bobby was trying to catch her eye for a congratulatory nod; but she did not move a muscle until O'Bannon rose and crossed over to the jury. Her eyes followed him. Then she remembered to turn and give her own counsel a mechanical smile—a smile such as a nurse gives a clever child who has just built a fort on the beach which the next wave is certain to sweep away.
"Gentlemen of the jury," said O'Bannon—and he bit off his words sharply; indeed, he and Wiley seemed to have changed rôles. He who had been so cool through the trial now showed feeling, a sort of quiet passion—"this is not a personal contest between the distinguished counsel for the defense and myself. Neither my youth nor my ambition nor my alleged ruthlessness are in question. The only question is, does the evidence show beyond a reasonable doubt that the defendant committed the crime for which she has been indicted?"
Then without an extra phrase, almost without an adjective, he went on quickly piling up the evidence against her until it reached its climax in the proof of the shortness of time that had elapsed between her leaving Eleanor's and the accident.
"A particularly serious responsibility rests upon you, gentlemen, in this case. The counsel for the defense seems to assume that the rich fare less well in our courts of law than the poor. That has not been my experience. I should be glad as a believer in democracy if I could believe that justice is more available to the poor than to the rich, but I cannot. Last month in this very court a boy, younger than the defendant, who earned his living as a driver of a delivery wagon, was sentenced to three years in prison for a lesser crime, and on evidence not one-tenth as convincing as the evidence now before you. A great many of us felt sorry for that boy, too, but we felt that essential justice was done. If through sentiment or pity essential justice cannot be done in this case, if sex, wealth or conspicuous position is a guarantee of immunity, a blow will be dealt to the respect for law in this country for which you gentlemen must take the responsibility. If you find by the evidence that the defendant has committed the crime for which she is indicted I ask you to face that fact with courage and honesty, and to bring in a verdict of guilty."
There was a gentle stir in the court. The attendant announced that anyone who wished to leave the court must do so immediately. No one would be allowed to move while the judge was charging. No one moved. The doors were closed, the attendants leaning against them.
Wiley bent over and whispered, "That sort of class appeal doesn't succeed nowadays. Give yourself no concern."
Concern was the last emotion Lydia felt, or rather she felt no emotion at all. Her interest had suddenly collapsed, the game was over. She was aware that the air of the court room was close and that she felt inexpressibly tired, especially in her wrists.
The judge wheeled toward the jury and drew in his chin until it seemed to rest upon his spinal column.
"Gentlemen of the jury," he said, "we have now reached that stage in this trial when it is my duty to present the matter for your deliberation. You know that the law makes a distinction between the duty of the court and the duty of the jury. You are the judge and the only judge of the facts, but you must accept the law from the court. You must not consider whether or not you approve of the law; whether you could or could not make a better law."
Lydia suppressed a yawn.
"The tiresome old man," she thought. "He actually seems to enjoy saying all that."
His Honor went on defining a reasonable doubt:
"It is not a whim or a speculation or a surmise. It is a doubt founded on reason—on a reason which may be stated."
Lydia thought, "Imagine drawing a salary for telling people that a reasonable doubt is a doubt founded on reason." She had not imagined that she would be bored at any moment of her own trial, but she was—bored beyond belief.
"I must call your attention to Section 30 of the Penal Law, which says that whenever a crime is distinguished into degrees, the jury, if they convict, must find the degree of the crime of which the prisoner is guilty. Manslaughter is a crime distinguished into degrees—namely, the first and the second degree."
Lydia thought that if by this time the jury did not know the distinction between the two they must be half-witted, but His Honor went on to define them:
"In the first degree, when committed without design to effect death by a person committing or attempting to commit a misdemeanor."
She thought that she knew that phrase now, as when she was a child she had known some of the rules of Latin grammar—verbs conjugated with ad, ante, con, in, inter—what did they do? How funny that she couldn't remember. Her eyes had again fixed themselves on the spot on the carpet so near O'Bannon's feet that she was aware of any movement on his part, and yet she was not looking at him. A fly came limply crawling into her vision, and her eyes followed it as it lit on O'Bannon's boot. She glanced up to where his hand was resting on his knee, and then wrenched her eyes away—back to the floor again.
"If you find that the defendant is not guilty of manslaughter in the first degree you must then consider whether or not she is guilty of manslaughter in the second degree—that is, whether she occasioned the death of Drummond by an act of culpable negligence. Culpable negligence has been defined by Recorder Smyth in the case of—in the case of the People against Bedenseick as the omission to do something which a reasonable and prudent man would do, or the doing of something which such a man would not do under the circumstances of each particular case. Or, what is the same thing——"
How incredibly tiresome! She glanced at the jury. They were actually listening, drinking in the judge's words. All of a sudden she knew by his tone that he was coming to an end.
"If you find that a killing has taken place, but that it is not manslaughter in either degree, then it is your duty to acquit. If on the other hand you find the defendant guilty in either degree you must not consider the penalty which may be imposed. That is the province of the court; yours is to consider the facts. Such, gentlemen, is the law. The evidence is before you. You are at liberty to believe or to disbelieve the testimony of any witness in part or as a whole, according to your common sense. Weigh the testimony, giving each fact its due proportion; and then, according to your best judgment, render your verdict."
His Honor was silent. There were a few requests to charge from both sides, and the jury filed solemnly out. Almost without a pause the next case was called, the attendant's voice ringing out as before—"The case of the People against——"
Lydia felt disinclined to move, as if even her bones were made of some soft dissoluble material. Then she saw that she had no choice. The next prisoner was waiting for her place—an unshaven, hollow-eyed Italian, with a stout, gray-clad lawyer who looked like Caruso at his side. As she left the court she could hear the clerk calling the new jury.
"William Roberts."
"Seat Number One."
Judge Homans flattered himself particularly on the celerity with which his court moved.
CHAPTER XII
Several of the New York papers the next morning carried editorials commending the verdict. Lydia sitting up in bed with a breakfast tray on her knee, read them coolly through.
"The safety of the highways"—"the irresponsibility of the younger generation, particularly among those of great wealth"—"pity must not degenerate into sentimentality"—"the equal administration of our laws——"
So the public was pleased with the verdict, was it? It little knew. She herself was filled with bitterness. The moment of the delivery of the verdict had been terrible to her.
She had not minded the hours of waiting. She had felt deadened, without special interest in what the jury decided. But this had changed the moment word came that the jury had reached a verdict. There was a terrible interval while the familiar roll of their names was called for the last time. Then she was told to stand up and face them, or rather to face the foreman, Josiah Howell, a bearded man with a lined brown face. He looked almost tremulously grave.
Lydia set her jaw, looking at him and thinking, "What business have you interfering in my fate?" But he was not the figure she was most aware of. It was the district attorney, whose excitement she knew was as great as her own.
"How say you?" said a voice. "Guilty or not guilty?"
"Guilty of manslaughter in the second degree," answered the foreman.
Lydia knew every eye in the court room was turned on her. She had heard of defendants who fainted on hearing an adverse verdict—keeled over like dead people. But one does not faint from anger, and anger was Lydia's emotion—anger that "that man" had actually obtained the verdict he wanted. Her breath came fast and her nostrils dilated. How sickening that she had nothing to do but stand there and let him triumph! No subsequent reversal would take away this moment from him.
The jury was thanked and dismissed. Wiley was busy putting in pleas that would enable her to remain at liberty during the appeal of her case. She stood alone, still now as a statue. She was thinking that some day the world should know by what methods that verdict had been obtained.
She had behaved well during her trial; had lived a life of retirement, seeing no one but Wiley and her immediate friends. But there was no further reason for playing a part. On the contrary she felt it would relieve her spirit to show the world—and O'Bannon—that she was not beaten yet. She did not intend to look upon herself as a criminal because he had induced a jury to convict her.
She bought herself some new clothes and went out every night, dancing till dawn and sleeping till noon. She began a new flirtation, this time with a good-looking insolent young English actor, Ludovic Blythe, hardly twenty-one, with a strange combination of wickedness and naïveté that some English boys possess. Her friends disapproved of him heartily.
At his suggestion she engaged a passage for England for early July. Wiley warned her that it was unlikely that the decision in her case would be handed down as soon as that, and if it were not she could not leave the country.
"There's no harm in engaging a cabin, is there?" she answered.
Her plan was to take in the end of the London season, with a few house parties in the English country, to spend September in Venice, two weeks in Paris buying clothes, and to come home in October.
"To Long Island?" Miss Bennett asked.
"Of course. Where else?" answered Lydia. "Do you think I shall allow myself to be driven out of my own home?"
But July came without the decision, and Lydia was obliged to cancel her passage. She was annoyed.
"Those lazy old judges," she said, "have actually adjourned for two months, and now I can't get off until September." Her tone indicated that she was doing a good deal for the law of her country, changing her plans like this.
O'Bannon, she heard, was taking a holiday too—going to Wyoming for a month. She thought that she would like to see something of the West, but instead she took a house at Newport for August—a fevered month. Blythe came to spend Sunday with her and stayed two weeks, fell in love with May Swayne, attempted to use his position as a guest of Lydia's to make himself appear a more desirable suitor in the eyes of the Swayne family—a solid old-fashioned fortune—and was turned out by Lydia after a scene of unusual violence.
A feud followed in which many people took—and changed—sides. Lydia fought gayly, briskly in the open. Her object was not Blythe's death, but his social extinction, and her method was not cold steel but ridicule. The war was won when May was made to see him as an impossible figure, comic, on the make—as perhaps he was, but no more so than when Lydia herself had received him. After this, though he lingered on a few days at a hotel, his ultimate disappearance was certain. Lydia and May remained friends throughout—as much friends as they had ever been. Since the day of their first meeting the two women had never permitted any man to be a friend of both of them.
Albee came and spent a brief twenty-four hours with her between a midnight train and Sunday boat. He was in the midst of a campaign as United States senator from his own state—certain of election. Lydia was kind and patient with him, but frankly bored.
"There's more stuff in Bobby," she confided to Benny, "who doesn't expect you to tremble at his nod. I hate fake strong men. I always feel tempted to call their bluff. It's a hard rôle they want to play. If they don't break you, you despise them. If they do—why, you're broken, no good to anyone."
She asked Eleanor to come and spend August with her, but Eleanor refused, saying, what was true enough, that she couldn't bear Newport. She could bear even less constant association with Lydia at this moment. Lydia's one preoccupation when they were together was to destroy Eleanor's friendship for O'Bannon. Often in old times Eleanor had laughed at the steady persistence that Lydia put into this sort of campaign of hate, but she could not laugh now, for as a matter of fact her friendship with O'Bannon was already destroyed. She hardly saw him, and if she did there was a veil between them. He was kind, he was open with her, he was everything except interested.
Eleanor loved O'Bannon, but with so intellectual a process that she was not far wrong in considering it was a friendship. She would have married him if he had asked her, but she would have done so principally to insure herself of his company. If anyone could have guaranteed that they would continue all their lives to live within a few yards of each other she would have been content—content even with the knowledge that every now and then some other less reasonable woman would come and sweep him away from her. She knew he was of a temperament susceptible to terrible gusts of emotion, but she considered that that was her hold upon him—she was so safe.
The remoteness that came to their relation now indicated another woman, and yet she knew his everyday life well enough to know that he was seeing no one except herself and Alma Wooley; and though there was some gossip about his attention to the girl, Eleanor felt she understood the reason for it. Alma made him feel emotionally what he knew rationally—that his prosecution of Lydia had been merely an act of justice. Alma thought him the greatest of men and was tremulously grateful to him for establishing her dead lover as a hero—a man killed in the performance of his duty. To her imagination Lydia was an unbelievable horror, like a wicked princess in a fairy tale. Eleanor wondered if she did not seem somewhat the same to O'Bannon. He never mentioned her name when she, Eleanor, spoke of her. It was like dropping a stone into a bottomless well. She listened and listened, and nothing came back from O'Bannon's abysmal silence. He spoke of her only once, and that was when he came to say good-by to Eleanor the day he started for Wyoming. He was eager to get away—into those mountains, to sleep under the stars and forget everything and everybody in the East.
"Mercy," Eleanor thought, "how ruthless men are! I wouldn't let any friend of mine see I was glad to leave him, even if I were."
"It's a rotten job—mine," he said. "I'm always sending people to prison who are either so abnormal they don't seem human or else so human they seem just like myself."
Presently Eleanor mentioned that Lydia had asked her to go to Newport for a month. O'Bannon turned on her sharply.
"And are you going?"
She said no, but it did not save her from his contempt.
"I don't see how you can be a friend of that woman's, Eleanor," he said.
"Lydia has the most attaching qualities when you know her, Dan."
"Attaching!" he broke out with a suppressed irritation she had never seen—a strange hate of her, Eleanor, for saying such a thing. "Arrogant, inflexible, using all her gifts—her brains and her incredible beauty—just to advance her own selfish ends!"
An impulse based partly on pure loyalty but partly on the idea that she could improve her position by showing her friend was not quite a monster made her answer, "You wouldn't believe, Dan, how if she really cares for you she can be tender almost clinging."
"For God's sake don't let's talk of her!" said O'Bannon, and it was on this note that they parted.
He wrote to her only once, though his letters to his mother were always at her disposal. She saw a great deal of the old lady, who developed a mild pleurisy as soon as her son's back was turned and didn't want Dan told of it. Eleanor spent most of that hot August taking care of her.
"I want him to have an uninterrupted holiday," said Mrs. O'Bannon firmly. "He hasn't been well. He doesn't sleep as he ought to, and he's cross, and you know it's not like Dan to be cross."
On the last day of August he was back, lean and sunburned, announcing himself to be in excellent condition. His first question was about the Thorne case.
"Are you anxious about it?" said his mother.
"Not a bit. They can't reverse us," he answered.
After Labor Day Lydia moved back to her Long Island house, and she was there when the decision in her case was handed down. The verdict of the lower court was sustained. It was a great blow to her—perhaps the first real blow she had ever received. She had so firmly made up her mind that the former verdict had been the result of undue influence of the district attorney that she had thought it impossible that the higher court would uphold it. Another triumph for "that man!" The idea of punishment was horrible to her—to be fined as a criminal. She still did not conceive it a possibility that she could be sent to prison.
"I can think of lots of ways in which I'd rather spend a thousand dollars," was her only comment.
But day and night she thought of the scene in court when she must present herself for sentence. In secret her courage failed her. It would be the visible symbol of O'Bannon's triumph over her. Yet her will threw itself in vain against the necessity. Nothing but death could save her. It would be short anyhow. She knew how it would be. She and Wiley would appear in the midst of some other wretch's trial. There would be whisperings about the judge's desk, and O'Bannon would be there—not looking at her, but triumphing in his black heart, and the judge would say "A thousand-dollar fine," or—no, nothing so succinct. He would find it an opportunity to talk about her and her case first. And then she would pay the money and leave court, a convicted criminal.
And then the second stage would begin. It would be her turn. She would give her life to getting even with O'Bannon. She who had always needed a purpose—a string on which to thread her life—had found it in hate. Most people found it in love, but for her part she enjoyed hate. It was exciting and active, and, oh, what a climax it promised! Yes, like the adventuress in the melodrama, she would go to him herself and say: "I've waited ten years to ruin you, and now I've done it. Have you been wondering all these years what was against you—what held you back and poisoned everything you touched? It was I!"
Other people, she knew, thought such things and never put them in action. But she had no reason to distrust the power of her own will, and never had she willed anything as she willed this. She began to arrange it. There were three ways in which you could hurt a man—through his love, through his ambitions and through his finances. A crooked politician like O'Bannon might suffer most by being ruined politically. She must always keep some hold on Albee for that. Money probably wouldn't greatly matter to O'Bannon. But love—he was an emotional creature. Women, she felt sure, played a tremendous rôle in his life. And he was attractive to them—accustomed to success probably. Oh, to think that she had been for a few seconds acquiescent in his arms! And yet that meant that she had power over him. She knew she had power. Should that be her method—to make him think that she had seen him not as an enemy but as a hero, a crusader, a master, that she was an adoring victim? Oh, how easily she could make love to him, and how successfully! She could imagine going down on her knees to him, winding herself about him, only she must have the climax ready so that at the same second she would destroy both his love and career. She must wait, and it would be hard to wait; but she must wait until she and Albee had dug a deep pit. Then she would call him to her and he would have to come. It was by thinking these thoughts that she managed to come into court calm and cold as steel.
"What have you now to say why the judgment of the court should not be pronounced upon you?"
The judge beckoned her and Wiley to his desk. O'Bannon was already there, standing so close that her arm would have touched his if she had not shrunk away. She trembled with hate. It was horrible to be so near him. She heard his own breath unsteadily drawn. Across the space that parted them waves of some tangible emotion leaped to and fro. She looked up at him and found that he, with clenched hands and drawn brows, was looking at her. So they remained.
"Your Honor," said Wiley in his smooth tones, "I would like to ask that a fine rather than a prison sentence be imposed on this prisoner, not only on account of her youth and previous good record, but because to a woman of her sheltered upbringing a prison sentence is a more severe punishment than the law contemplated."
"I entirely disagree with you, counselor," said the judge in a loud ringing tone. "The feature that makes the court so reluctant ordinarily to impose prison sentences is the subsequent difficulty in earning a living. That consideration is entirely absent in the present case. On the other hand, to impose a fine would be palpably ridiculous, constituting for this defendant no punishment whatsoever. I sentence this prisoner"—the judge paused and drew in his chin—"to not less than three nor more than seven years in state's prison."
She heard Wiley passionately pleading with Judge Homans. A blue-coated figure was now standing beside her. It was still incredible.
"This is your doing," she heard her own voice saying very softly to O'Bannon.
To her surprise she saw that emotion, what emotion she did not know, made it impossible for him to answer. His eyes stared at her out of a face whiter than her own. It was his emotion that communicated her own situation to her. His hand on the desk was shaking. She knew he could not have done what she proceeded to do. She turned and walked with the policeman to the iron-latticed passageway that led to jail.
As the door clanged behind her O'Bannon turned and walked out of court, and getting into his car drove away westward. At two in the morning Eleanor was waked by a telephone from Mrs. O'Bannon. Dan had not come home. She was afraid something had happened to him. A man in his position had many enemies. Did Eleanor think that some friend or lover of that Thorne girl——
Oh, no, Eleanor was sure not!
The next morning—for a small town holds few secrets—she knew that O'Bannon had returned at six o'clock, drunk.
"Oh, dear heaven," thought Eleanor, "must he re-travel that road?"
CHAPTER XIII
Lydia and her guard arrived at the prison early in the evening. She had been travelling all through the hot, bright September day. For the first hour she had been only aware of the proximity of the guard, of the crowded car, the mingled smell of oranges and coal smoke, the newspaper on the floor, trodden by every foot, containing probably an account of her departure for her long imprisonment. Then, her eyes wandering to the river, she suddenly remembered that it would be years before she saw mountains and flowing water again. Perhaps she would never see them again.
During the previous winter she had gone with Benny and Mrs. Galton to visit a prison in a neighboring state—a man's prison. It was considered an unfortunate example. Scenes from that visit came back to her in a series of pictures. A giant negro highwayman weaving at an immense loom with a heavy, hopeless regularity. Black, airless punishment cells—"never used nowadays," the warden had said lightly, and had been corrected by a low murmur from the keeper; two of them were in use at the moment. The tiers of ordinary cells, not so very much better, with their barred loopholes. And the smells—the terrible prison smells. At their best, disinfectant and stale soap; at worst—Lydia never knew that it was possible to remember a smell as she now remembered that one. But most of all she remembered the chalky pallor of some of the prisoners, some obviously tubercular, others twitching with nervous affections. She doubted coolly if many people were strong enough to go through years of that sort of thing.
So she would look at the river as if she might never see it again.
They were already in the Highlands, and the hills on the eastern side—her side of the river—were throwing a morning shadow on the water, while across the way the white marble buildings at West Point shone in the sunlight. Storm King with its abrupt bulk interposed itself between the two sections of new road—the road which Lydia had so much desired to see finished. She and Bobby had had a plan to motor along it to the Emmonses some day—Newburgh. There was a hotel there where she had stopped once for luncheon on her way to Tuxedo from somewhere or other. Then presently the bridge at Poughkeepsie, and then the station at which she had got out when she had spent Sunday with the Emmonses, the day Evans had been arrested and had confessed to that man——There was the very pillar she had waited beside while the chauffeur looked up her bags. Now the river began to narrow, there were marshy islands in it, and huge shaky ice houses along the brink. It all unrolled before her like a picture that she was never going to see again. Then Albany, set on its hills, and the train, turning sharply, rumbled over the bridge into the blackened station. Almost everybody in the car got out here, for the train stopped some time; but she and her guard remained sitting silently side by side. Then presently they were going on again, through the beautiful wide fertile valley of the Mohawk——They were getting near, very near. She felt not frightened but physically sick. She wondered if her hair would be cut short. Of course it would. It seemed to her like an indignity committed by O'Bannon's own hand.
It was dark when they reached the station, so dark that she could not get a definite idea of anything but the great wall of the prison, and the clang of the unbarring of the great gate. Later she came to know the doorway with its incongruous beauty—the white door with its fanlight and side windows, and two low stairways curving up to it, and, above, the ironwork porch, supported on square ironwork columns of a leaf pattern, suggestive somehow of an old wistaria vine. But now she knew nothing between the gate and the opening of the front door.
She entered what might have been the wide hall of an old-fashioned and extraordinarily bare country house. A wide stairway rose straight before her, and wide, old-fashioned doors opened formally to left and right.
She was taken into the room at the right—the matron's room. While her name and age and crime were being registered she stood staring straight before her where bookshelves ran to the ceiling. She could recognise familiar bindings—the works of Marion Crawford and Mrs. Humphry Ward.
Calm brown-eyed women seemed to surround her, but she would not even look at them. Their impersonal kindness seemed to be founded on the insulting knowledge of her utter helplessness. They chatted a little with the guard who had brought her. Was the train late? Well, not as bad as last time.
She wondered how soon they would cut her hair.
After a little while she was taken through a long corridor directly to a spacious bathroom. Her clothes, wrapped in a sheet, were borne away. At this Lydia gave a short laugh. It pleased her as a sign that the routine in her case was palpably ridiculous—to take away her things as if they were infected. She was given a bath, a nightgown of most unfriendly texture was handed to her, and presently she was locked in her cell—still in possession of her hair.
She felt like an animal in a trap—could imagine herself running along the floor smelling at cracks for some hope of escape, with that strange head motion, up and down, up and down, of a newly caged animal.
More even than the locks and bolts, she minded the open grille in the door, like an eye through which she might at any moment of the day or night be spied upon. At every footstep she prepared herself to meet with a defiant stare the eyes of an inspector. The cell was hardly a cell, but a room larger than most hall bedrooms. The bed had a white cover; so had the table; and the window, though barred, was large. But this made no impression on Lydia. She was conscious of being locked in. Only her pride and her hard common sense kept her from beating at the door with her bare hands and making one of those screaming outbreaks so familiar to prison officials.
She who had never been coerced was now to be coerced in every action, surrounded everywhere by symbols of coercion. She who had been so intense an individualist that she had discarded a French model if she saw other women wearing it was now to wear a striped gingham dress of universal pattern. She whose competent white hands had never done a piece of useful work was sentenced to not less than three or more than seven years of hard labor. What would that be—hard labor? The vision of that giant negro working hopelessly at his loom was before her all night long.
All night long she wandered up and down her cell, now and then laying her hand on the door to assure herself of the incredible fact that it was locked. Only for a few minutes at dawn she fell asleep, forgetting the catastrophe, the malignant fate that had overtaken her, and woke imagining herself at home.
When her cell door was unlocked she stepped out into the same corridor along which she had passed the night before. She found it a blaze of sunlight. Great patches of sunlight fell in barred patterns on the boards of the floor, scrubbed as white as the deck of a man-of-war. Remembering the gloomy granite loopholes of her imagination, this sun seemed insolently bright.
The law compels every prisoner, unless specially exempted, to spend an hour a day in school. Lydia's examination was satisfactory enough to exempt her, but she was set to work in the schoolroom, giving out books, helping with papers, erasing the blackboards, collecting the chalk and erasers. In this way the whole population of the prison—about seventy-five women—passed before her in the different grades. She might have found interest and opportunity, but she was in no humor to be coöperative.
She sat there despising them all, feeling her own essential difference—from the bright-eyed Italian girl who had known no English eighteen months before and was now so industrious a student, to the large, calm, unbelievably good-tempered teacher. The atmosphere of the room was not that of a prison school but of a kindergarten. That was what annoyed Lydia—that these women seemed to like to learn. They spelled with enthusiasm—these grown women. Up and down pages they went, spelling "passenger" and "transfer" and "station"—it was evidently a lesson about a trolley car. Was she, Lydia Thorne, expected to join joyfully in some such child-like discipline? In mental arithmetic the competition grew keener. Muriel, a soft-voiced colored girl, made eight and seven amount to thirteen. The class laughed gayly. Lydia covered her face with her hands.
"Oh," she thought, "he might better have killed me than this!"
It seemed to her that this terrible impersonal routine was turning on her like a great wheel and grinding her into the earth. What incredible perversity it Was that no one—no prisoner, no guard, not even the clear-eyed matron—would see the obvious fact that she was not a criminal as these others were.
Had O'Bannon's power reached even into the isolation of prison and dictated that she should be treated like everyone else—she who was so different from these uneducated, emotional, unstable beings about her?
It was her former maid, Evans, who destroyed this illusion. The different wards of the prison ate separately; and as Evans was not in her ward they did not meet during the day. They met in the hour after tea, before the prisoners were locked in their cells for the night; an hour when in the large hall they were allowed to read and talk and sew and tat—tatting was very popular just then.
Lydia had sunk into a rocking-chair. She could not fix her mind on a book, and she did not know how to sew or tat, and talk for talk's sake had never been one of her amusements. She was thinking "One day has gone by out of perhaps seven years. In seven years I shall be thirty-three," when she felt some one approaching her, and looking up she saw it was Evans.
Evans, in a striped cotton, did not look so different from the lady's maid of the old days, except, as Lydia noticed with vague surprise, she had put on weight. She came with the hurried walk that made her skirts flip out at her heels—the same walk with which she used to come when she was late to dress Lydia for dinner. She almost expected to hear the familiar, "What will you wear, miss?" A dozen memories flashed into her mind—Evans polishing her jewels in the sunlight, Evans locked in the disordered bedroom refusing her confidence to everyone, and then collapsing and confessing to "that man."
She looked away from the approaching figure, hoping the girl would take the hint; but no, Evans was drawing up a chair with something of the manner of a hostess to a new arrival.
"Oh, Evans!" was Lydia's greeting, very much in her old manner.
"You'd better call me Louisa here—I mean, it's first names we use," said Evans.
The fact had already been called to her former employer's attention by Muriel, who had done nothing but call her Lydia in a futile effort to be friendly. She steeled herself to hear it from Evans, who, however, managed to avoid it. She gossiped of the prison news, and tried to cheer and help this newcomer with whatever wisdom she had acquired. Lydia neither moved nor answered nor again looked up.
"As the matron says," Evans ran on, "the worst is over when you get here. It's the trial and the sentence and the journey that's worst. After a week or so you'll begin to get used to it."
Lydia's nostrils trembled.
"I shall never get used to it," she said. "I don't belong here. What I did was no crime."
There was a short pause. Lydia waited for Evans' cordial agreement to what seemed a self-evident assertion. None came. Instead she said gently, as she might have explained to a child, "Oh, miss, they all think that!"
"Think what?"
"That what they did was no real harm—that they were unjustly condemned. There isn't one here who won't tell you that. The worse they are the more they think it."
Lydia had looked up from her contemplation of the gray rag rug. No sermon could have stopped her as short as that—the idea that she was exactly like all the other inmates. She protested, more to herself than to Evans.
"But it is different! What I did was an accident, not a deliberate crime."
Evans smiled her old, rare, gentle smile.
"But the law says it was a crime."
Horrible! Horrible but true! Lydia was to find that every woman there felt exactly as she did; that she was a special case; that she had done nothing wrong; that her conviction had been brought about by an incompetent lawyer, a vindictive district attorney, a bribed jury, a perjured witness. The first thing each of them wanted to explain was that she—like Lydia—was a special case.
The innocent-looking little girl who had committed bigamy. "Isn't it to laugh?" said she. "Gee, when you think what men do to us! And I get five years for not knowing he was dead! And what harm did I do him anyway?"
And the gaunt elderly stenographer who had run an illicit mail-order business for her employers. One of them had evidently occupied her whole horizon, taking the place of all law, moral and judicial.
"He said it was positively legal," she kept repeating, believing evidently that the judge and jury had been pitifully misinformed.
And there was the stout middle-aged woman with sandy hair and a bland competent manner—she was competent. She had made a specialty of real-estate frauds.
"I was entirely within the law," she said, as one hardly interested to argue the matter.
And there were gay young mulatto girls and bright-eyed Italians, who all said the same thing—"everyone does it; only the other girl squealed on me"—and there were the egotists, who were never going to get into this mess again. Some girls had to steal for a living; they had brains enough to go straight. Even the woman who had attempted to kill her husband felt she had been absolutely within her rights and after hearing her story Lydia was inclined to agree with her.
Only Evans seemed to feel that her sentence had been just.
"No, it wasn't right what I did," she said, and she stood out like a star, superior to her surroundings. She only was learning and growing in the terrible routine. It soon began to seem to Lydia that this little fool of a maid of hers was a great person. Why?
Locked in her cell from dark to daylight, Lydia spent much of the time in thinking. Like a great many people in this world, she had never thought before. She had particularly arranged her life so she should not think. Most people who think they think really dream. Lydia was no dreamer. She lacked the romantic imagination that makes dreams magical. Clear-sighted and pessimistic when she looked at life, the reality had seemed hideous, and she looked away as quickly as possible, looked back to the material beauty with which she had surrounded herself and the pleasant activities always within reach. Now, cut off from pleasure and beauty, it seemed to her for the first time as if there were a real adventure in having the courage to examine the whole scheme of life. Its pattern could hardly be more hideous than that of every day.
What was she? What reason had she for living? What use could life be put to? What was the truth?
A verse she could not place kept running through her head:
Quand j'ai connu la Vérité,
J'ai cru que c'était une amie;
Quand je l'ai comprise et sentie,
J'en étais déjà dégoûté.
Et pourtant elle est éternelle,
Et ceux qui se sont passés d'elle
Ici-bas ont tout ignoré.
She had been deliberately ignorant of much of life—of everything.
She went through a period of despair, all the worse because, like a face in a nightmare, it was featureless. It was despair, not over the fact that she was in prison but over the whole scheme of the universe, the futile hordes of human beings living and hoping and failing and passing away.
Despair paralyzed her bodily activities. Her mind, even her giant will, failed her. She could neither sleep nor eat, and after a week of it was taken to the hospital. The rumor ran through the prison that she was going mad—that was the way it always began. She lay in the hospital two days, hardly moving. Her face seemed to have shrunk and her eyes to have grown large and fiery. The doctor came and talked to her. She would not answer him; she would not meet his gaze; she would do nothing but draw long unnatural breaths like sighs.
In the room next to her there was a mother with a six-months-old baby. Lydia at the best of times had never been much interested in babies, though all young animals made a certain appeal to her. Her friends' babies, swaddled and guarded by nurses, lacked the spontaneous charm of a kitten or a puppy. This baby, however—Joseph his name was, and he was always so referred to—was different. He spent a great deal of time alone, sitting erect in his white iron crib. In spite of the conditions of his birth, he was calm, pink-cheeked and healthy. The first day that Lydia was up she glanced at him as she passed the door. He gave her somehow the impression of leading a life apart. At first she only used to stare at him from the doorway; then she ventured in, leaned on the crib, offered him a finger to which he clung, invented a game of clapping of hands, and was rewarded by a toothless smile and a long complicated gurgle of delight.
The sound was too much for Lydia—the idea that the baby was glad to be starting out on the tortured adventure of living. She went back to her own room in tears, weeping not for her own griefs but because all human beings were so infinitely pathetic.
The next day, Anna, the mother, came in while she was bending over the crib. Lydia knew her story, the common one—the story of a respectable, sheltered girl falling suddenly, wildly in love with a handsome boy, and finding, when after a few months he wearied of her, that she had never been his wife—that he was already married.
Lydia looked at the neat, blond, spectacled woman beside her. It was hard to imagine her murdering anyone. She seemed gentle, vague, perhaps a little defective. Later in their acquaintance she told Lydia how she had done it. She had not minded his perfidy so much, until he told her that she had known all along they weren't married—that she'd done it with her eyes open—that she had been "out for a good time." He was a paperhanger among other things, and a great pair of shears had been lying on the table. The first thing she knew they were buried in his side.
Lydia could not resist asking her whether she regretted what she had done.
The girl considered. "I think it was right for him to die," she said, but she was sorry about Joseph. In a little while the baby would be taken from her and put into a state institution. She was maternal—primitively maternal—and her real punishment was not imprisonment but separation from her child. Lydia saw this without entirely understanding it.
The girl had said to her: "I suppose you can't imagine killing anyone?"
Lydia assured her that she could—oh, very easily. She went back to her room thinking that she was more a murderess at heart than this girl, who was now nothing but a mother.
When she came out of the hospital she was not put back at the schoolroom work but was sent to the kitchen. This was an immense tiled room which gave the impression to those who first entered it of being entirely empty. Then the eye fell on a row of copper containers—three of them as tall as she—one for tea, one for coffee, one for hot water, and three smaller pots, round like witches' caldrons, for the cooking of cereals and meats and potatoes. The baking was done in an adjacent alcove. There Lydia was put to work. Gradually the process began to interest her—the mixing of the dough and the baking of dozens of loaves at a time in a great oven with rotating shelves in it. The oven, like all ovens, had its caprices, dependent upon the amount of heat being used by the rest of the institution. Lydia set herself to master the subject. A certain strain of practical competence in her had never before had its expression.
CHAPTER XIV
As Lydia began to emerge from her depression she clung to Evans, who had first made her see that she could not think anything human alien to herself. The disciplined little Englishwoman, sincere and without self-pity, seemed the purveyor of wisdom. She saw her own mistakes clearly. William—William was the pale young footman, about whom they talked a good deal—had urged her for a long time to pick up a ten-dollar bill now and then or a forgotten bit of jewelry. She had never felt any temptation to do so until Lydia had been so indifferent about the loss of the bracelet. What was the use of caring so much about the safety of the jewels if the owner cared so little?
"Oh, that bracelet!" murmured Lydia, remembering how she had last seen it in O'Bannon's hand in court. For a moment she did not follow what Evans was saying, and came back in the midst of a sentence.
"——and made me see that because you were wrong that did not make me right. Then I got ready to confess. He made me see that the real harm was done and over when I took a thing that wasn't mine, and that the only way to get back was to obey the law and go to prison and get through with it as quick as I could. I owe a lot to him, Lydia—not that he preached at me, but his eyes looked right into me."
"Of whom are you speaking?" Lydia asked sharply.
"Of Mr. O'Bannon," answered Evans, and a reverent tone came into her voice.
This was too much for Lydia. She broke out, assuring Evans that she had been quite right to take the jewels. She, Lydia, now knew what a thoughtless, inconsiderate employer she had always been. But as for "that man," Evans must see that he had only tricked her into confessing in order to save himself trouble. It was a feather in his cap—to get a confession. He had not thought about saving her soul. Lydia stamped her foot in the old way but without creating any impression on the bewitched girl, who insisted on being grateful to the man who had imprisoned her.
"Is that what he is looking for from me?" thought Lydia.
Long, long winter nights in prison are excellent periods for thinking out a revenge. She saw it would not be easy to revenge herself on O'Bannon. If it were Albee it would be simple enough—she would make him publicly ridiculous. To wound that sensitive egotism would be to slay the inner man. If it were Bobby—poor dear Bobby—she would destroy his self-confidence and starve him to death through his own belief that he was worthless. But what could she do to O'Bannon but kill him—or make him love her? Perhaps threaten to kill him. She tried to think of him on his knees, pleading for his life. But no, she couldn't give the vision reality. He wouldn't go down on his knees; he wouldn't plead; he'd stand up to her in defiance and she would be forced to shoot to prove that she had meant what she said.
She had been in prison about three months when one morning word came to the kitchen that she was wanted in the reception room. This meant a visitor. It was not Miss Bennett's day. It must be a specially privileged visitor. Her guest was Albee.
Prisoners whose conduct was good enough to keep them in the first grade were allowed to see visitors once a week. Miss Bennett came regularly, and Eleanor had come more than once. Lydia was very eager to see these two, but was not eager to see anyone else. There was always a terrible moment of shyness with newcomers—an awkward ugly moment. She did not wish to see anyone who did not love her in a simple human way that swept away restraint.
She did not want to see Albee, and she was equally sure he did not want to see her but had been driven by the politician's fear of leaving behind him in his course onward and upward any smoldering fires of hatred which a little easy kindness might quench. As a matter of fact, she did not hate Albee—nor like him. She simply recognized him as a useful person whom all her life she would go on using. This coming interview must serve to attach him to her, so that if in the future she needed a powerful politician to help her destroy O'Bannon she would have one ready to her hand. She knew exactly and instinctively how to manage Albee—not by being appealing and friendly. If she were nice to him he would go away feeling that that chapter in his life was satisfactorily closed. But if she were hostile, if she made him uncomfortable, he would work to win back her friendship. Prisoner as she was, she would be his master. She arranged herself, expression and spirit alike, to meet him sternly.
She did not stop to consider the impression she might make on her visitor—in her striped dress and her prison shoes. It was never Lydia's habit to think first of the impression she was making.
She was brought to the matron's room, and then crossing the hall she entered the bare reception room, with its chill, white mantelpiece, the fireplace blocked by a sheet of metal, its empty center table and stiff straight-backed chairs. She entered without any anticipation of what was in store for her, and saw a tall figure just turning from the window. It was O'Bannon. She had just a blurred vision of his gray eyes and the hollows in his cheeks. Then her wrists and knees seemed to melt, her heart turned over within her; everything grew yellow, green and black, and she fainted—falling gently full length at the feet of the district attorney.
When she came to she was in her own cell. She turned her head slowly to right and left.
"Where is that man?" she said. She was told he had gone.
Of course he had gone—gone without waiting for her recovery, without speaking to anyone else. There was the proof that he was vindictive; that he had come to humiliate her, to feast his eyes on her distress. He had hardly dared hope that she would faint at his feet. There was real cruelty for you, she thought—to ruin a woman's life and then to come and enjoy the spectacle. What a story for him to go home with, to remember and smile over, to tell, perhaps, to his mother or Eleanor!
"The poor girl!" he might say with tones of false pity in his voice. "At the mere sight of me she fainted dead away and lay at my feet in her prison dress, her hands coarsened by hard work——"
This last proof of her utter defenselessness infuriated her. She was justified in her revenge, whatever it might be. The thought of it ran through all her dreams like a secret romance.
It began to take shape in her mind as political ruin. She knew from Eleanor that he had ambitions. He had taken the district attorneyship with the intention of making it lead to higher political office. She had fancies of defeating him in a campaign, using all the tragedy of her own experience to rouse the emotions of audiences. Easier to destroy him within his own party by Albee's help—easier, but not so spectacular. He might not know who had done it unless she went to him and explained. Over that interview her mind often lingered.
As her ideas of retribution took shape she became happier in her daily life, as if the thought of O'Bannon sucked up all the poison in her nature and left her other relations sweeter.
If Lydia had but known it, her revenge was complete when she fell at his feet. The months she had spent in prison had been paradise compared to the months he had spent at large. The verdict in the case had hardly been rendered before he had begun to be tortured by doubts as to his own motives. It was no help to him that his reason offered him a perfect defense. The girl was a criminal—reckless, irresponsible and untruthful, more deserving of punishment than most of the defendants who came into court. If there were any personal animus in his prosecution there was an excuse for it in the fact that Albee had certainly come to him with the intention of exerting dishonorable pressure in her behalf. Everyone he saw—his mother, Eleanor, Foster, Judge Homan—all believed that he had followed the path of duty in spite of many shining temptations to be weakly pitiful. But he himself knew—and gradually came to admit—that he had done what he passionately desired to do. Even he could not look deeply enough into his own heart to understand his motives, but he began to be aware of a secret growing remorse poisoning his inner life.
The thought of her in prison was never out of his mind, and it was a nightmare prison he thought of. In the first warm September days he imagined the leaden, airless heat of cells. When October turned suddenly cold and windy he remembered how she was accustomed to playing golf on the windy links and how he had once seen her driving from a tee near the roadside with her skirts wrapped about her by her vigorous swing. He gave up playing bridge—the memories were too poignant. And after Eleanor had once mentioned that Lydia was fond of dancing he could not listen to a strain of dance music. Christmas was a particularly trying time to him, with all its assumption of rejoicing—a prison Christmas!
During the holidays he was in New York for a few days. His theory was that lack of exercise was the reason for his not sleeping better. He used to take long walks in the afternoon and evening so as to go to bed tired.
One afternoon at twilight he was walking round the reservoir in the Park when he recognized something familiar in a trim little figure approaching him—something that changed the beat of his heart. It was Miss Bennett. He stopped her, uncertain of his reception.
"Is that Mr. O'Bannon?" she said, staring up at him in the dim light.
The city beyond the bare trees had begun to turn into a sort of universal lilac mist, punctuated with yellow dots of light. It was too dark for Miss Bennett to see any change in O'Bannon's appearance, anything ravaged and worn, anything suggesting an abnormal strain. Miss Bennett, though kind and gentle, was not imaginative about turbulent, irregular emotions, such as she herself did not experience. She was not on the lookout for danger signals.
She did not feel unfriendly to O'Bannon. On the contrary she admired him. She could, as she said, see his side of it. She prided herself on seeing both sides of every question. She greeted him cordially as soon as she was sure it was he. He turned and walked with her. They had the reservoir to themselves.
Miss Bennett thought it more tactful not to refer to Lydia. She began talking about the beauty of the city. Country people always spoke as if all natural beauty were excluded from towns, but for her part——
O'Bannon suddenly interrupted her.
"Have you seen Miss Thorne lately?" he said in a queer, quick, low tone.
When Benny felt a thing she could always express it. This was fortunate for her because when she expressed it she relieved the acuteness of her own feeling. She very naturally, therefore, sought the right phrase, even sometimes one of an almost indecent poignancy, because the more poignantly she made the other person feel the more sure she could be of her own relief. Then, too, she was not sorry that O'Bannon should understand just what it was he had done—his duty, perhaps, but he might as well know the consequences.
"Have I seen her?" she exclaimed. "Oh, Mr. O'Bannon!" There was a pause as if it were too terrible to go on with, but of course she did go on. "I see her every week. She's like an animal in a trap. Perhaps you never saw one—in a trap, I mean. Lydia had a gray wolfhound once, and in the woods it strayed away and got caught in a mink trap. It was almost dead when we found it, but so patient and hopeless. She's getting to be like that—each week a little more patient than the week before—she who was never patient. Oh, Mr. O'Bannon, I feel sometimes as if I couldn't bear it—the way they've ground it out of her in a few months! She seems like an old woman in a lovely young woman's body. They haven't spoiled that—at least they haven't yet."
She wiped her eyes with a filmy handkerchief, and her step became brisker. She felt better. For a moment she had got rid of the pathos of the situation. O'Bannon, she saw, had taken up her burden. He walked along beside her silent for a few steps, and then suddenly took off his hat, murmured something about being late for an engagement and left her, disappearing down the steep slope of the reservoir.
He wandered restlessly up and down like a man in physical pain. No reality, he finally decided, could be as terrible as the visions which, with the help of Miss Bennett, his imagination kept calling before him. That night he took the train, and in the middle of the next morning arrived at the prison gates.
There was no difficulty about his seeing the prisoner. His explanation that he was passing by on his way to see the warden about one of the men prisoners was not required. The matron agreed readily to send for Lydia. It seemed to him a long time before she came. He stood staring out of the window, stray sentences leaping up in his mind—"not less than three nor more than seven years"—"an animal in a trap"—"an old woman in a lovely young woman's body." He heard steps approaching and his pulses began to beat thickly and heavily. He turned round, and as he did so she fell at his feet.
The matron came in, running at the sound of her fall. O'Bannon picked her up limp as a rag doll in his arms and carried her back to her cell. Under most circumstances he would have noticed that the cell was bright and large, but now he only compared it, with a pang at his heart, to that large, luxurious, deserted bedroom of Lydia's in which he had once interviewed Evans.
The matron drove him away before Lydia recovered consciousness. He waited in the outer room, heard that she was perfectly well, and then took his miserable departure. He got back to New York late that night, and the next day he resigned his position as district attorney.
Eleanor read of his resignation first in the local paper, and came to his mother for an explanation; but Mrs. O'Bannon was as much surprised as anyone. Without acknowledging it, both women were frightened at the prospect of O'Bannon's attempting, without backing, to build up a law practice in New York. Both dreaded the effect upon him of failure. Both would have advised against his resigning his position. Perhaps for this very reason neither had been consulted.
The two women who loved him parted with specious expressions of confidence. Doubtless Dan would make a great success of it, they said. He was brilliant, and worked so hard.
CHAPTER XV
In the spring Lydia was transferred from the kitchen to the long, bright workroom. Here the women prisoners hemmed the blankets woven in the men's prison. Here they themselves wove the rag rugs for the floors, made up the house linen and their own clothes—Joseph's too—not only their prison clothes, but the complete outfit with which each prisoner was dismissed.
Lydia was incredibly awkward with the needle. It surprised the tall, thin assistant in charge of the workroom that anyone who had had what she described as advantages could be so grossly ignorant of the art of sewing. Lydia hardly knew on which finger to put her thimble and tied a knot in her thread like a man tying a rope. But it was her very inability that first woke her interest, her will. She did not like to be stupider than anyone else. Suddenly one day her little jaw set and she decided to learn how to sew. From that moment she began to adjust herself to prison life.
Lydia wondered, considering prisoners in the first grade are allowed to receive visits from their families once a week, and from others, with the approval of the warden, once a month, at the small number of visitors who came to the prison. Were all these women cast off by their families? Evans explained the matter to her, and Lydia felt ashamed that she had needed an explanation.
"It takes a man a week's salary—at a good job, too—from New York here and back."
Lydia did what was rare of her—she colored. For the first time in her life she felt ashamed, not so much of the privileges of money but of the ease with which she had always taken them. It came over her that this was one of the objects for which Mrs. Galton had once asked a subscription. A memory rose of the way in which in old days she used to dispose of her morning's mail when it came in on her flowered breakfast tray. Advertisements and financial appeals from unknown sources were twisted together by her vigorous fingers and tossed into the waste-paper basket. Mrs. Galton's might well have been among these.
She was horrified on looking back at her own lack of humanity. She might have guessed without going through the experience that prison life needed some alleviation. It meant a great deal to her to see Benny every week. Benny stood in the place of her family. She longed to hear of the outside world and her old friends. But she did not crave these visits with such passion as the imprisoned mothers craved a sight of their children.
Thought leading quickly to action in Lydia, she arranged through Miss Bennett, allowing it to be supposed to be Miss Bennett's enterprise, to finance the visits of families to the prison. Everyone rejoiced, as if it were a common benefit, over the visit of Muriel's mother and the beautiful auburn-haired daughter of the middle-aged real-estate operator. Lydia felt as if she had been outside the human race all her life and had just been initiated into it. She said something like this to Evans.
"Oh, Louisa, rich people don't know anything, do they?"
Evans tried to console her.
"If they want to they always can."
It was true, Lydia thought; she had not wanted to know. She had not wanted anything but her own way, irrespective of anyone else's. That was being criminal—to want your own way too much. That was all that these people about her had wanted—these forgers and defrauders—their own way, their own way. Though she still held her belief that the killing of Drummond had been an accident, she saw that the bribing of him had been wrong—the same streak in her, the same determination to have her own way. She thought of her father and all their early struggles, and how when she had believed that she was triumphing most over him she had been at her worst.
Her poor father! It was from him she had inherited her will, but he had learned in life, as she was now learning in prison, that the strongest will is the will that knows how to bend.
She thought a great deal about her father. He must have been terribly lonely sometimes. She had never given him anything in the way of affection. She had not really loved him, and yet she loved him now. Her heart ached with a palpable weight of remorse. He had been her only relation, and she had done nothing but fight and oppose and wound him. What a cruel, stupid creature she had been—all her life! And now it was too late. Her father was gone, so long ago she had almost forgotten him in one aspect. And then again it would seem as if he must still be somewhere, waiting to order her upstairs as he had when she was a child.
Only Benny was left—Benny whom she had so despised. Yet Benny would not need to go to prison in order to learn to respect other people's rights. Benny had been born knowing just what everyone else wanted—eager to get all men their hearts' desire.
Lydia was not religious by temperament. She had now none of the joy of a great revelation. But she had the courage, unsupported by any sense of a higher power, to look at herself as she was. She saw now that her relation to life had always been ugly, hostile, violent. Everyone who had ever loved her had been able to love through something beautiful in their own natures—in spite of all the unloveliness of hers. She thought not only of the relations she had missed, like the relation to her father, but of friendships she had lost, which she had deliberately broken in the hideous daily struggle to get her own way. She would never now renew that struggle. She had come in contact with something stronger than herself, of which the impersonal power of the law was only a visible symbol. She was not sure whether it had broken her or remade her, but it had given her peace—happiness she had never had—a peace which she believed she could preserve even when she went out of the sheltering routine of prison. The only feature of life which terrified and revolted her was the persisting individuality of Lydia Thorne. If there were only a charm other than death to free you from yourself! Sometimes she felt like a maniac chained to a mirror. Yet she knew that it was the long months of enforced contemplations that had saved her.
On Friday evening the inmates were allowed to dance in the assembly room—half theater, half chapel. In her effort to escape from herself Lydia went once to watch, and came again and again with increasing interest. It soon began to be rumored that she was a good dancer and knew new steps. The dances became dancing classes. Lydia, except for her natural impatience, was a born teacher, clear in her explanations and willing to work for perfection.
Evans, who had taken Lydia to so many balls in past years, smiled to see her laboring over the steps of some heavy grandmother or light-footed—and perhaps light-fingered—mulatto girl.
An evening suddenly came back to her. It was in New York. She had come downstairs about eleven o'clock with Miss Thorne's opera cloak and fan. There had been people to dinner, but they had all gone except Mr. Dorset, and he was being instructed in some new intricacy of the dance. Miss Bennett, who belonged to a generation that knew something about playing the piano, was making music for them. Evans, if she shut her eyes, could see Lydia as she was then, in a short blue brocade, trying to shove her partner into the correct step and literally shaking him when he failed to catch her rhythm. She was being far more patient with Muriel, holding her pale coffee-colored hands and repeating, "One-two, one-two; one-two-three-four. There, Muriel, you've got it!" Her face lit up with pleasure as she turned to Evans. "Isn't she quick at it, Louisa?"
Lydia's second spring in prison was well advanced when she was sent for by the matron. Such a summons was an event Lydia racked her brain to think what was coming—for good or evil. The matron's first question was startling. Did she know anything about baseball?
Did she? Yes, something. Her mind went back to a Fourth of July house party she had been to where a baseball game among the guests was a yearly feature. She and the matron discussed the possibilities of getting up two nines among the inmates. She suggested that there were books on the subject. A book would be provided. She felt touched and flattered at the responsibility put upon her, humbly eager to succeed.
The whole question began to absorb her. She studied it in the evening and thought about it during the day, considering the possibilities of her material, the relation of character to skill. Grace, a forger, was actually a better pitcher, but the woman who had killed her husband had infinitely more staying power.
All through that second summer she occupied herself, day and night, with the team, more and more as September drew to a close. For she knew that with the approaching expiration of her minimum sentence the parole board would consider her release. Freedom in all probability was near, and freedom is a disorganizing thought to prisoners. The peace she had gained in prison began to flow away as each day brought her nearer to release. She began to dream that she was already free, and to wake dissatisfied, with a trace of the same restless irritation of her first weeks. Could it be, she thought, that she had learned nothing after all? Could even the idea of returning to the old life change her back into the old detestable thing?
Prison authorities have learned that the last night in prison is more trying to a prisoner's morale than any other, except perhaps the first. Lydia found it so when her last night there came. She knew that she was to be set free early in the morning. Miss Bennett would be there, and they would take an early train to New York together. It was a certainty, she kept telling herself, a certainty on which she could rely, and yet she spent the entire night in an agony of fear and impatience. She would have been calmer if she had been waiting the hour of a prearranged escape. The darkness of night continued so long that it seemed as if some unheralded eclipse had done away with sunrise, and when at last the dawn began to color the window the hour between it and her release was nothing but a fevered anxiety.
She was hardly aware of Miss Bennett waiting for her in the matron's room—hardly aware of the matron herself, imperturbable as ever, bidding her good-by. Only the clang of the gate behind her quieted her. Only from outside the bars did she want to pause and look back at the prison as at an old friend.
It was a bright autumn morning. The wind was chasing immense white clouds across the sky and scattering the leaves of the endless row of trees that stood like sentinels along the high wall.
Miss Bennett wanted to hurry across the street at once to the railroad station, although their train would not start for some time; she wanted to get away from the menace of that dark wall—a very perfect piece of masonry. But Lydia had seen it too long from the inside not to be eager to savor a view of it from without. She stared slowly about her like a tourist before some spectacle of awesome beauty. She looked down the alley between the trees and the wall to where on her left was the sharp clean corner of the stonework. She looked to her right, where as the wall rose higher she could see the little watchtower of the prison guard. Then she turned completely round and looked back through the bars at the prison itself.
"Don't you think it's a pretty old doorway?" she said.
Miss Bennett acknowledged its beauty rather briefly.
"Will you tell me why it has 'State Asylum' on the horse block?" she said.
"That's just what it is," said Lydia—"an asylum, a real asylum to some of us. It used to be for the insane, Benny. That's why."
On the all-day journey to New York Miss Bennett had counted on hearing the full psychological story of the last two years. In her visits to the prison she had found that Lydia wanted to hear of the outside world—not to talk of herself; but now that she was free Miss Bennett hoped this might be changed. She had taken a compartment so they could be by themselves, but the minute the door was shut upon them a funny change came over Lydia. She grew absent and tense, and at last she sprang up and opened it.
"It's pleasanter open," she said haughtily, and then she suddenly laughed. "Oh, Benny, to be able to open a closed door!"
Miss Bennett began to cry softly. All these months she had been trying to persuade herself that the change in Lydia was due to prison clothes; but now, seeing her dressed as she used to dress, the change was still there. She was thinner, finer—shaped, as it were, by a sharper mold. All her reactions were slower. It took her longer to answer, longer to smile. This gave her—what Lydia had never had before—a touch of mystery, as if her real life were going on somewhere else, below the surface, remote from companionship.
She wiped her eyes, thinking that she must not let Lydia guess she thought her changed. Their eyes met. Lydia was discovering a curious fact, which she in her turn thought it better to conceal. It was this: That the figures of her prison life had a depth and reality that made all the rest of the world seem like shadows. Even while she questioned Miss Bennett about her friends she felt as if she were asking about characters in a book which she had not had time to finish. Would Bobby be sure to be at the station? Was Eleanor coming to town that night to see her? Where was Albee?
Miss Bennett did not know where Albee was, and her tone indicated that she did not greatly care. She did not intend to stir Lydia up against anyone but she could not help wishing Lydia would punish Albee. He had not been really loyal, and he was the only one of the intimate circle who had not been. A man with red blood in his veins, Miss Bennett thought, would have married Lydia the day before she went to prison or would at least be waiting, hat in hand, the day she came out.
Bobby, gay and affectionate as ever, met them at the station and drove with them to the town house. Morson opened the front door and ran down the steps with a blank face and a brisk manner, as if she had been returning from a week-end; but as she stepped out of the motor he attempted a sentence.
"Glad to see you back, miss," he said, and then his self-control gave way. He turned aside with one hand over his eyes and the other feeling wildly in his tail pocket for a handkerchief.
Lydia began to cry too. She put her hand on Morson's shoulder and said, "I'm so glad to see you, Morson. You're almost the oldest friend I have in the world," and she added, without shame, to Miss Bennett, "Isn't it awful the way I cry at anything nowadays?"
She went into the house, blowing her nose.
The house was full of telegrams and flowers. Lydia did not open the telegrams, but the flowers seemed to give her pleasure. She went about breathing in long whiffs of them and touching their petals. Morson, in perfect control of himself, but with his eyes as red as fire, came to ask at what hour she would dine.
Lydia had a great deal to do before dinner. She produced a dirty paper from her pocketbook and began studying it.
"Is there anything special you'd like to order?" said Miss Bennett.
Lydia did not look up but answered that Morson remembered what she liked, which drove him out of the room again. Her telephoning, it appeared, was to the families and friends of her fellow prisoners. She was very conscientious about it, and very patient, even with those who, unaccustomed to the telephone or unwilling to lose touch with a voice so recently come from their loved ones, would ask the same question over and over again.
But finally it was over, and Lydia free to bathe and dress and finally to sit down in her own dining room to a wonderful little meal that was the symbol of her freedom. Yet all she could think of was the smell of the freshly baked dinner rolls that brought back the large, low kitchen and the revolving oven—revolving at that very moment, perhaps—so far away.
"Oh, my dear," said Miss Bennett, "I've found the nicest little maid for you—a Swiss girl who can sew—really make your things if you want her to, and——"
Lydia felt embarrassed. She turned her head from side to side as Miss Bennett ran on describing the discovery. She simply could never have a maid again. How was she to explain? She did not understand it thoroughly herself, only she knew that she could never again demand that another woman—as young, perhaps, and as fond of amusement as herself—should give a lifetime to taking care of her wardrobe. Personal service like that would annoy and embarrass her now. The first thing to do was to make her life less complex in such matters. She put her hand over Miss Bennett's as it lay on the table.
"Shouldn't you think she'd wish me back at hard labor?" she said to Bobby. "She takes such a lot of trouble for me."
Miss Bennett, emotionally susceptible to praise, wiped her eyes, and presently went away, leaving Bobby and Lydia alone. She wondered if perhaps that would be the best thing for Lydia to do—to rebuild her life on Bobby's gay but unwavering devotion.
Lydia, leaning her elbows on the table and her chin on her hands, listened while Bobby gossiped over the empty coffee cups. Did Lydia know about this Western coal man that May Swayne was going to marry? Bobby set him before her in an instant—"A round-faced man, Lydia, with $30,000,000, and such a vocabulary! He never thinks; he presumes. He doesn't come into a room; he ventures to intrude. May has quite a lot of alterations to do on him."
And the Piers—had Lydia heard about them? Fanny had fallen in love with the prophet of a new religion and had made all her arrangements to divorce Noel, but before she left him, as a proof of her new powers, she thought she'd cure him of drinking. Well, my dear, she did. And the result was she found she liked a nonalcoholic Noel better than ever—and she chucked the seer. Can you beat it?
Shadows—they did seem like shadows to Lydia. Staring before her, she fell into meditation, remembering Evans and the pale coffee-colored Muriel and the matron—the small, placid-browed matron who knew not fear.
Suddenly she came back to realize that Bobby was asking her to marry him.
Most of their acquaintances believed that he never did anything else; but as a matter of fact, it was the first time he had ever put it into words. He wasn't sure it was a tactful thing to do now. She might think—Bobby was always terribly aware of what people might think—that his suggesting such a mediocre future for her was to admit that he thought her beaten. Whereas to him she was as triumphant and desirable as ever. On the other hand, it might be just the right thing to do. With men like Albee getting to cover and some people bound to be hateful, she could say to herself, "Well, I can always marry Bobby and go to live in Italy."
He put it to her.
"Lydia, wouldn't you consider marrying me to-morrow and sailing for Greece or Sicily or Grenada—that's a heavenly place. I should be so wildly happy, dear, that I think you'd be pleased in a mild sort of way, too."
Go away? It was the last thing she wanted to do.
"No, no!" she said quickly. "I must stay here!"
"Well, marry me and stay here."
She shook her head, trying to explain to him—she wouldn't ever marry. She had found a new clew to life and wanted to follow it alone. She had interest, intense, vital interest, to give to life and affairs—yes, and even people; but she had not love. Human relationships couldn't make or mar life for her any more. She wanted to work—nothing else.
She paused, and in the pause the dining-room door opened and Eleanor came in. Eleanor had been up at dawn to get a train from the Adirondacks in time to meet Lydia at the station, and of course the train had been late. Would Lydia put her up for the night?
Lydia's cry of welcome did not sound like a person to whom all human relationships had become indifferent. Indeed Eleanor was the person she wanted most to see. Eleanor was not emotional, or rather she expressed her emotion by a heightened intellectual sensitiveness. She wouldn't cry, she wouldn't regard Lydia as a shorn lamb the way Miss Bennett did, nor yet would she assume that she was utterly unchanged, as all the rest of her friends might. Eleanor's manner was almost commonplace. Perhaps it would be fairer to say that she left the introduction of anything dramatic to Lydia's choice.
Bobby soon went away and left the two women together. They went upstairs to Lydia's bedroom, and in their dressing gowns, with chairs drawn to the fire, they talked. They talked with long pauses between them. No one but Eleanor would have allowed those long silences to pass uninterrupted, but she was wise enough to know they were the very essence of companionship.
Though Eleanor asked several questions about the details of prison life, she was too wise to ask anything about the fundamental change which she felt had taken place in Lydia. She did not betray that she felt there was a change. She wondered whether Lydia knew it herself. It was hard to say, for the girl, always inexpert with verbal expressions, had become more so in the two years of solitude and contemplation. Whatever spontaneity of speech she had had was gone. She was, Eleanor thought, like a person using an unfamiliar tongue, aware of the difficulty of putting thought into words.
She could not help being touched—and a little amused—at the seriousness with which Lydia mentioned her late companions; Lydia, who had always been so selective about her own friends and so scornful about everybody else's. She spoke of Evans, the pallid little thief, as if light had flowed from her as from an incarnation of the Buddha. Seeing that Lydia had caught some reflection of the thought, Eleanor thought it better to put it into words.
"Now, don't tell me, my dear," she said, "that you, too, have discovered that all criminals are pure white souls."
"Just the opposite. All pure white souls are criminals—all of us are criminals at heart. The only way not to be is to recognize the fact that you are. It's a terrible idea at first—at least it was to me. It was like going through death and coming out alive." Lydia paused, staring before her, and anyone in the world except Eleanor would have thought she had finished; but Eleanor's fine ear caught the beat of an approaching idea. "But it's such a comfort, Nell, to belong to the tribe—such a relief. And I should never have had it if it had not been"—she hesitated, and Eleanor's heart contracted with a sudden fear that the name of O'Bannon was about to enter—"if it had not been for my accident."
Eleanor was not sure that Lydia had deliberately avoided the name. What, she wondered, was left of that unjust and bitter hatred? She could not detect a trace of bitterness anywhere in Lydia's nature to-night. But then she had always had those moments of gentleness.
Presently Miss Bennett came in to say in her old, timid, suggestive manner that it was late—she hated to interrupt them, but she really did think that Lydia ought to go to bed. Lydia got up at once.
"I suppose I ought," she said. "It's been an exciting day for me."
Eleanor noted that such a suggestion from Miss Bennett in old days would have meant that Lydia would have felt it her duty to stay up another hour.
"I have to, my dear," she would have said, "or else Benny would be trying to coerce me in every detail of my life."
CHAPTER XVI
The next morning at the regular prison hour Lydia woke with a start. She had been aware for some time of a strange unaccountable roaring in her ears. She looked about her, surprised to see that the light of dawn was not falling through a tall barred aperture at the head of her bed, but was coming across a wide carpeted room from two chintz-curtained windows. Then she remembered she was at home; the roaring was the habitual sound of a great city; the room was the room she had had since she was a child. It seemed less familiar to her, less homelike, than her cell. She put out her hand to the satin coverlet and the sheets, softer than satin. The physical sensation of the contact was delicious, and yet there was something sad about it too. It was the thought of her late companions that made her sad, as if she had deserted them in trouble.
It would be two hours or more before Eleanor and Benny would be awake. She flung her arms above her head and lay back, thinking. She mustn't let them cherish her as if she were a wounded, stricken creature. She was more to be envied now than in the old fighting days, when all her inner life had been a sort of poisoned turmoil. No one had pitied her then.
Her plan had been not to be too hasty in arranging her new life, which she knew must include work—work in connection with prisoners. But now she saw she mustn't waste a minute. She must have work at once to take her away from herself. She could hardly face the coming day—everyone considering her and that detestable ego of hers, asking her what she wanted to do. She must have a routine immediately. She was not strong enough yet to live without one. Only one thing must take precedence of everything else—a pardon for Evans. She could not bear to remain at liberty with Evans still serving a sentence. With that accomplished, she could go forward in peace. In peace? As she thought of it she knew that there was one corner of her mind where there was not and never would be peace. Only last evening, in the first happiness of being at home, the mention of O'Bannon's name had threatened to destroy it.
And now he was in her mind, holding it without rivals. The moment had come when her hatred of him could find expression. It needn't be a secret dream, like a child's fairy story. She needn't suppress it—she could act. If she had not been such a coward last evening she would have named him and gone boldly on and found out from Eleanor where he was, what he was doing, what was his heart's desire. Perhaps if she had put her questions frankly Eleanor would not have told her; but it would not be difficult to deceive so doting a friend of his. Eleanor could easily be persuaded that his victim had been so tamed and crushed in prison that she had come to admire him, to look differently on the world.
Suddenly Lydia sat straight up in her bed. And hadn't she changed? In the old days she had never felt with more bitter violence than she was feeling now. The excitement of her revenge had wiped out every other interest. The flame of her hatred had destroyed the whole structure of her new philosophy. She sat up in her bed and wrung her hands. What could she do? What could she do? The mere thought of that man changed her back into being the woman she hated to be. She would rather die than live as her old self, but how could she help thinking of him when the idea of injuring him was more vivid, more exciting, than any other idea in the world? She had come out of prison resolved that her first action would be to get a pardon for Evans, and here she was forgetting her obligations and her remorse, forgetting everything but a desire to wound and destroy. He had the power to make her what she loathed to be.
Her room was at the back of the house, and the sun, finding some chink between the houses behind the Thorne house, crept in under the shades and began moving slowly across the plain, dark, velvet carpet. It had time to move some distance while she sat there immovable, unaware of her surroundings.
Gradually she came to see that she must choose between the two. Either she must give up forever the idea of revenging herself on O'Bannon or she must give up all the peace and wisdom that she had so painfully learned—she had almost lost it already, and she had not been twenty-four hours out of prison.
An hour later Eleanor was wakened by the opening of her door. Lydia was standing at the foot of her bed, grasping the edge of it in her two white hands. It was Eleanor's first good look at her in the light of day. She was startled by Lydia's beauty—a kind of beauty she had never had before. No one could now have likened her to a picture by Cabanel of the Star of the Harem. Everything sleek and hard and smooth had gone. She looked more like the picture of some ravaged, pale Spanish saint, still so young that the inner struggle had molded without lining her face. She stood staring at Eleanor, her dark hair standing out about her face, and her pale dressing gown defining the beautiful line of her shoulders, as she raised them, pressing her hands down on the foot of the bed.
"Well, my dear, good morning," was Eleanor's greeting, though she was not unaware that something emotional was in the air.
"Eleanor," began the other, her enormous tragic eyes fixed now, not on her friend's, but on a spot on the pillow about five inches away, "there is something I want to say to you." The best agreement was silence, and Lydia went on, "I want you never to talk to me about that man—your friend—I mean O'Bannon."
"Talk of him!" exclaimed Eleanor, her first thought being, "Am I always talking of him?"
"I don't want to hear of him or think of him or speak of him."
This time Eleanor's hesitation was not entirely acquiescent.
"I can understand," she said, "that you might not want to see him, but to speak of him——I have been thinking, Lydia, that that is one of the subjects that you and I ought to talk over—to talk out."
"No, no!" returned Lydia quickly, and Eleanor saw with surprise that it was only by leaning on her hands that she kept them from trembling. "I can't explain it to you—I don't want to go into it—but I don't want to remember that he exists. If you would just accept it as a fact, and tell other people—Benny and Bobby. If you would do that for me, Eleanor——"
"Of course I'll do it," answered Eleanor. There really was not anything else to say. The next instant Lydia was gone.
Eleanor lay quite still, trying to understand the meaning of the scene. She was often accused by her friends of coldness, of lack of human imagination, of attempting to substitute mental for emotional processes. Aware of a certain amount of justice in these accusations, she tried to atone by putting her reasoning faculty most patiently and gently at work upon the problems of those she loved. Her nature was not capable of really understanding turgidity, but she did better than most people inasmuch as she avoided forming wrong judgments about it. She felt about Lydia now as she had once felt when O'Bannon had described to her his struggle against drinking—wonder that a person so much braver and stronger than she, Eleanor, was, could be content to avoid temptation instead of fighting it.
At breakfast, which the three women had together, Eleanor saw that Lydia had regained her calm of the evening before. While they were still at table Wiley was shown in. He felt obviously a certain constraint, an embarrassment to know what to say, which he concealed under a formal professional manner. Lydia put a stop to this simply enough by getting up and putting her arms round his neck.
"I've thought so much of all you've been doing for me since I was a child," she said.
He was associated in her mind with her father. Wiley felt his eyelids stinging.
"Why, my dear child, my dear child!" he said. And he held her off to look at her as if uncertain that it was the same girl. "Well, I must say prison doesn't seem to have done you much harm."
"It's done me good, I hope," said Lydia.
She made him sit down and drink an extra cup of coffee. There was something quite like a festival in the comradeship that developed among the four of them. She began to question her visitor about the method of getting a pardon for Evans. He advised her to go and see Mrs. Galton. At the name she and Benny glanced at each other and smiled. They were both thinking of the day when Lydia had so resented the presence of the old lady in her house.
She went to Mrs. Galton's office that same morning. It occupied the second floor of an old building that looked out over Union Square. Lydia had not thought of making an appointment, and when she reached the outer office she was told that Mrs. Galton was engaged—would be engaged for some time—a member of the parole board was in conference. Would Miss Thorne wait?
Yes, Lydia would wait. She sat down on a hard bench and watched the work of the society go on before her eyes. She had some knowledge of business and finance, and she knew very soon that she was in the presence of an efficient organization; but it was not only the efficiency that charmed her—it was partly the mere business routine, which made her feel like coming home after she had been at sea. The clear impersonal purpose of it all promised forgetfulness of self. At the end of half an hour of waiting she was possessed with the desire to become part of this work. Here was the solution of her problem. When at last she was shown into Mrs. Galton's bleak little office—not half the size of Lydia's cell—her first words were not of Evans, after all.
"Mrs. Galton," she said, "can you use me in this organization?"
Without intending the smallest disrespect to Mrs. Galton, it must be admitted that this question was like asking a lion if it could use a lamb. The organization, like all others of its type, needed devotion, needed workers, needed money, and was not averse to a little discreet publicity. All these Lydia offered. Mrs. Galton smiled.
"Yes," she said. The monosyllable was expressive.
The older woman, with forty years of executive work behind her, divided all workers roughly into two classes: The amiable idealists who created no antagonism and accomplished nothing, and the effective workers who accomplished marvels and stirred up endless quarrels. She—except in her very weakest moments—preferred the latter, though they disrupted her office force and gave her nervous indigestion. She recognized Lydia as belonging to this class.
And presently, being a wise and experienced woman, she recognized another fact: That she was probably in the presence of her successor. A pang shot through her. She was seventy and keener than ever about the work to which she had given all her life. If she kept this girl out she would hold office longer than if she let her in. If she let her in it would vivify the whole organization. She might become the ideal leader; at least she could be made so—youth, beauty, money, experience of prison conditions and the romance of her story to capture public imagination.
Lydia, with her acute sense of her own unworthiness, was dimly aware of some hesitation, and supposed that she was being weighed in the balance. She had no suspicion that a struggle, somewhat like her own struggle, was going on in the honest, philanthropic breast before her. A few minutes afterwards Mrs. Galton offered her the treasurership. Lydia was overcome by the honor.
"But I thought you had a treasurer, already," she murmured. "If I could be her assistant——"
"Oh, no doubt she will be glad to resign," said the president with a calmness that suggested that glad or not the resignation would be forthcoming.
The two women went out to lunch together. More and more, as they talked, Lydia saw that this was just what she wanted. This would be her salvation. After they were back in the office again she spoke of Evans. What could she do? What must be done?
"Let me see," said Mrs. Galton. "You were the complaining witness against her, I suppose. Well, you must see the judge and the district attorney who tried the case."
Lydia gave a funny little sound, half exclamation, half moan.
"O'Bannon!" she said.
No, Mrs. Galton thought that wasn't the name of the district attorney of Princess County. She rang her bell and told her secretary to look it up, while she went on calmly discussing the details of the procedure. Presently the secretary returned with a book. John J. Hillyer was district attorney.
"Are you sure?" Lydia asked. "I thought Mr. O'Bannon was."
The secretary said, consulting her book, that he had resigned almost two years before.
"But we'd have to have his signature, wouldn't we?" said Mrs. Galton.
She and the secretary talked of it, back and forth, not knowing that they were setting an impossible condition for Lydia. She couldn't ask O'Bannon. All her interest in the prospect of this new work had withered at the name. She felt a profound discouragement. It was terrible to find she would rather leave Evans in prison than ask O'Bannon to help get her out; terrible to find that man like a barrier across every path she tried to follow in order to escape from him. She thanked them for the trouble they had taken and rose to go. It was arranged that she was to come and begin work on the following Monday.
It was almost tea time when she reached home. Bobby was there, and the Piers, and presently May Swayne came in with her coal baron. Lydia's first emotion on seeing them was a warm, welcoming gladness, but she soon found to her surprise that she had very little to say to them.
The truth was that she had lost the trick of meeting her fellow beings in a purely social relation, and the conscious effort to adapt herself, her words, her attention to them exhausted her. She looked back with wonder to the old days, when she had done nothing else all day long.
Miss Bennett soon began to notice that she was looking like a little piece of carved ivory, with eyes of the blackest jet. When at last her visitors had all gone she went straight to bed.
The next day she had herself driven down to Wide Plains, so that she could see Judge Homans. Court was still in session when she got there, and she was shown to the judge's little book-lined room and left to wait. She had expected her first view of the wide main street, of Mr. Wooley's shop, of the columned courthouse to be intensely painful to her, but it wasn't. The tall attendant who ushered her in greeted her warmly. She remembered him clearly leaning against the double doors of the court room to prevent anyone leaving during the judge's charge.
Presently the judge came in, just as he had come in every day to her trial, his hands folded, his robes flowing about him. Lydia rose. Her name apparently had not been given to him, for he looked at her in surprise. Then his face lit up.
"My dear Miss Thorne," he said, "when did you get out?"
It was the first perfectly natural, spontaneous reference to her imprisonment that she had heard since she left prison. It did away with all constraint and awkwardness, to be taken as a matter of course. Criminals were no novelty in the judge's life. He sat down, waved her into a chair opposite, put his elbows on the arms of his swinging chair and locked his knuckles together.
"I'm very glad to see you—very glad indeed," he said.
But he wasn't at all surprised that she had come. It was not unusual, evidently, for the first visit of a released convict to be paid to the judge. He began to question her rather as if she were a child home for the holidays.
"And what did you learn? Baking? Now that's interesting, isn't it? And sewing? Well, well!"
He treated her so simply that Lydia found herself speaking to him with more freedom about the whole experience of prison than she had been able to speak to anyone. The reason was, she thought, that she did not need to explain to him that she was not a tragic exception, a special case. To him she was just one of a long series of lawbreakers.
They talked for an hour. She noted that the judge still enjoyed talking, still insisted on rounding out his sentences; but she felt now no impatience. His reminiscences interested her. Before long she found herself consulting him about a subject that had long preyed on her mind—Alma Wooley. She wanted to do something for Alma Wooley, yet she supposed the girl would utterly reject anything coming from the woman who had——
The judge put his hand on her arm.
"Now don't you worry a mite about Alma," he said. "Alma married a nice young fellow out of the district attorney's office—named Foster—and now they have a baby, a nice little baby. I was saying to her father only yesterday that Foster is a much better man for her——"
While the judge was launched on his speech to Mr. Wooley, Lydia's mind went back to Foster—Foster waiting and watching for O'Bannon like a puppy for its supper. Well, she could forgive him even his admiration for that man since he had made Alma Wooley happy. A weight was lifted from her conscience.
Finally, with some embarrassment, she told the judge the object of her visit—a pardon for Evans. She was prepared to have him remind her, as O'Bannon had once done, that it was a matter which had been in her own hands, in that in this very room in which she was now sitting she had virtually refused to help Evans. But Judge Homans, if he remembered, made no reference to the past.
"Yes, yes," he said. "Now let me see. It must have been O'Bannon tried that case, wasn't it?" Lydia nodded, and he went on, "Poor O'Bannon! I miss him very much. He resigned, you know, about the time Mrs. O'Bannon died."
"He was married?" asked Lydia, and even in her own ears her voice sounded unnaturally loud.
No, the judge said, it was the old lady, his mother; and he went on telling Lydia what a fine fellow the former district attorney had been—a good man and a good lawyer.
"The two are not always combined," the judge said with a chuckle, feeling something cold in his auditor's attention.
Lydia rose to her feet. She was sorry, she said, that she really must be going home. The judge found his soft black hat and accompanied her to her car.
"Don't drive yourself?" he asked.
She shook her head. She would never drive a car again. The judge patted her hand—told her to come and see him again—let him know how she was getting on. She promised. She saw that in some way an unbreakable human bond had been established between them by the fact that she had committed a crime and he had sentenced her to state's prison for it.
She went home feeling encouraged. Not only had she managed to get him to agree to enlist O'Bannon's help in the matter of Evans' pardon, but she herself had supported the mention of O'Bannon's name with something that was almost calm.
CHAPTER XVII
It was noticeable—though no one noticed it—that a month after Lydia went to work in Mrs. Galton's organization everyone in her immediate circle was doing something for released convicts. Bobby, Miss Bennett, Eleanor, Wiley, all suddenly began to think that the problem of the criminal was the most important, the most vital, the most interesting problem in the world. The explanation was simple: A will like Lydia's, harnessed to a constructive purpose, was far more irresistible than in the old days when it had been selfish, spasmodic and undisciplined.
She was given a little office, like Miss Galton's, and she was in it every morning at nine o'clock. Miss Bennett, who had worried all her life because Lydia led an irregular, aimless, idle existence, now worried even more because her working hours were long.
"Surely," she protested almost every morning, "Mrs. Galton will not care if you don't get there until half past nine or even ten. These cold days it isn't good for you——"
Lydia explained that she was not going to the office early in order to please Mrs. Galton, who, as a matter of fact, did not arrive there until late in the morning. The organization needed money desperately, there was much to be done. But the truth was she loved the routine—the hard impersonal work. It saved her from herself. She was almost happy.
Eleanor had evidently done what she had been asked to do, for O'Bannon seemed to have dropped out of the world. His name was never mentioned, and as week after week went by it seemed to Lydia that she herself was forgetting him. Perhaps a time would come when she could even see him without wrecking her peace of soul. Her only sorrow was the delay in Evans' pardon. It didn't come. Lydia could not enjoy her liberty with Evans in prison. The forms had all been complied with, but the governor did not act. At last Mrs. Galton suggested her going to Albany; or perhaps she knew someone who would have influence with the governor. Yes, Lydia knew someone—Albee.
Albee was now senator from his own state, and a busy session in Washington had kept him there. He had been among the first to telegraph Lydia. She found his message and his flowers in the house when she first came home. The message sounded as if it had come from a friend; but Lydia knew that it had not; that Albee had escaped from her and her influence, or thought he had. She had known it even in the days of her trial, and looking back on the facts and on herself she wondered that she had not resented it. Those were days in which she had awarded punishments readily, and Albee had really behaved badly to her. They had been very nearly engaged and yet the instant she was in trouble he had deserted her. He had gone through all the motions of helping her, but in spirit she knew that Albee the day she killed Drummond had begun to disentangle himself. She felt not the least resentment against him; only she recognized the fact that his remoteness from her made it more difficult to make use of him for Evans, unless—the idea suddenly came to her—it might make it easier. He would avoid seeing her if he could; but if she found her way to him he might be eager to atone, to set himself right by doing her a definite favor.
The evening of the day that she saw this clearly she took a train to Washington. The next morning she was waiting in his outer office before he reached it himself. A new secretary—the old one had been promoted to some position of political prominence at home—did not know her and had not been warned against her by name. So she was sitting there when Albee came in with his old cheerful, dominating, leonine look. Just for the fraction of a second his face fell at seeing her, and then he hurried to her side, as if out of all the world she was the person he most wanted to see.
It must not be supposed that Lydia had become so saintly that she had forgotten her knowledge of men. She knew now that if she were cordial to Albee she could not depend on his doing what she wanted. If on the other hand she withheld her friendship she was sure he would bid high for it. She ignored all his flustered protestations. She smiled at him, a smile a little sad, a little chilly and infinitely remote.
"I want very much to speak to you, Stephen," she said, and her tone told him that whatever she wanted to talk about had nothing whatsoever to do with themselves.
He led her into the inner office. A curious thing was happening to him. He had never been in love with Lydia. He had deliberately allowed her beauty and wealth to dazzle him; he had admired her courage, her sureness of herself, contrasting it with his own terror of giving offense to anyone; but at times he had almost hated her. If she had inspired him with one atom of tenderness he would not have deserted her. She never had. He had cut himself off from her without regret. But now as she sat there, finer and paler and more—much more—than two years older, she did inspire tenderness, tenderness of a most vivid and disturbing sort. He could not take his eyes from her face. He suddenly cut into what she was saying about Evans.
"Lydia, my dear, are you happy? Yes, yes, of course I can get from the governor anything you ask me, but tell me about yourself."
He leaned over, taking her hands in his. She rose, withdrawing them slowly as she did so.
"Not now," she answered, and moved toward the door.
"You mustn't go like that," he protested. "Just think, my dear, I have not seen you for two years—the toughest two years I ever spent! You can't just come and go like this. I must see you, talk to you."
"When you have got me Evans' pardon, Stephen—if you get it." She still spoke gently, but there was a good deal of intention behind Lydia at her gentlest.
He caught the "if"—almost an insult after his confident assertion, but he did not think of the insult. He was aware of nothing but the desire that she should smile gayly and admiringly at him again as she used to, making him feel Jovian.
"I'm going to New York on Thursday," he said. "On Friday evening you shall have the pardon. Will you be at the opera Friday evening?"
She hesitated. She had not been to the opera yet. She could not bear the publicity of that blazing circle, but she had kept her box. After all, she thought, she could sit in the back of it, and music was one of the greatest of her pleasures.
"Will you join me there?" she said.
"It will be like old times."
"Not quite," she answered.
Still with his hand on the knob of the door, as if he were just going to open it for her, he detained her, trying to make her talk, asking her about her friends, her work, her health; trying to hit upon the master key to her mind, and at last, for he was a man of long experience, he found it.
"And that damned crook who prosecuted your case," he said. "Do you ever see him?"
She shook her head.
"I prefer not even to think of him," she replied, and this time she made a gesture that he should open the door. Instead he stepped in front of it. He had waked her; he had her attention at last.
"Naturally, naturally," he said, "but I wish you would think of him for a minute. I'm in rather a fix about that fellow."
She longed to know what the fix was, but she did not dare hear. She said softly, "Please don't make me think of him, Stephen. I'd really rather not."
"But you must listen, Lydia. Help me. I don't know what I ought to do. I have it in my power to ruin that man. Shall I?"
There was a pause. Albee heard her long breaths trembling as she drew them. He thought to himself that his knowledge of her had not gone astray. She had hated that man, and whatever else had changed in her, that hadn't. She suddenly came to life and tried to open the door for herself.
"I must go," she said. He did not move.
"You know," he said, speaking quickly, "that after your trial he went to pieces, resigned his position, took to drinking again, tried to make his way in New York. He was nearly down and out for a time there."
He watched her. A smile, a terrible smile, began to curve the corners of her mouth. He went on:
"I couldn't be exactly sorry for his bad luck. In fact, to be candid, I gave him a kick or two when I had the chance. But now he's pulled himself out. He's worked like a dog, and I hear that a couple of friends of mine, of the firm of Simpson, Aspinwall & McCarter, are going to offer him a partnership. It's a big firm, particularly in the political world." There was a short silence. "Shall I let him have it, Lydia?"
She raised her shoulders scornfully.
"Could you stop his getting it, Stephen?"
"Do you doubt it?"
She turned on him. Her jaw was set and lifted as in the old days.
"Of course I do! If you could have you certainly would have without consulting me. There is a man who you know lacks all integrity and honor, and who, moreover, goes about saying that you tried to bribe him—and failed. Oh, he makes a great point of that—you failed! Would you let a man like that go into a firm of your friends if you could stop it? No, no! Not unless you have grown a good deal meeker than I remember you, Stephen."
Albee made a sweeping gesture, as expressive as a Roman emperor's thumbs down.
"He shall not have it," and he added with a smile as cruel as Lydia's own: "He believes himself absolutely sure of it."
She smiled straight into his eyes.
"Bring me that Friday night," she said. "It's more important than the pardon."
He opened the door for her and she went out.
This was Wednesday. She could hardly wait for Friday to come. This was the right way—to destroy the man first and then to forget him. She had been silly and sentimental and weak to fancy that she could have real peace in any other way, to imagine that she could go through life skulking, fearing. She was furious at herself when she remembered that she had asked Eleanor to avoid mentioning his name. She could mention his name now herself, and see him too. She would enjoy seeing him. She was hardly aware of the passage of time on her journey back to New York. She was living over a meeting between O'Bannon and herself after the partnership had been withdrawn. He must be made aware that it was her doing.
She reached home just before dinner, and found that Miss Bennett was dining out. Good! Lydia had no objection to being alone. But Benny had arranged otherwise. She had telephoned to Eleanor, and she was coming to dine. Lydia smiled. That was pleasant too.
Eleanor was an intelligent woman but not a mind reader. She saw some change had taken place in Lydia, noticed that she ate no dinner, and came to the conclusion that something had gone wrong about Evans' pardon; that Albee had been, as usual, a weak friend. When they were alone after dinner was over she prepared herself to hear the story. Instead, Lydia said, "I'm going to the opera on Friday, Nell—Samson and Delilah. Will you come with me?"
There was a little pause, a slight constraint. Then Eleanor answered that she couldn't; that she had a box of her own that someone had sent her. Lydia sprang up with a sudden, short, wild laugh.
"That man's going with you!" she said.
"Mr. O'Bannon? Yes, he is." Eleanor thought a second. "I'll put him off, Lydia. I'll tell him not to come."
"You'll do nothing of the kind. It's perfect. I don't know what got into me the other day, Eleanor. You must have despised me for such pitiful cowardice."
"No, my dear," said Eleanor slowly, but obviously relieved that the question had come up again. "But I did feel that you weren't going to work the best way to get the poison of the whole thing out of your soul."
Lydia laughed the same way again.
"Oh, don't worry about that! I shall get rid of the poison."
"How?"
"I shall make him suffer. I shall revenge myself, and then forget he exists. You can tell him so if you want."
Eleanor stared in front of her, blank and serious. Then she said, "I don't have many opportunities any more. I seldom see him."
Lydia's eyes brightened.
"Ah, you've found him out!"
"On the contrary, the longer I know him the more highly I think of him. I don't see him because he's busy. He has been having a difficult time—in business. He decided to get out of politics and go into straight law. New York is like a ferocious monster to a man beginning any profession. Dan—but it doesn't matter. His troubles are over now."
"Are they indeed?" said Lydia.
"Yes, he's had a wonderful offer of a partnership from an older man who——Oh, Lydia, you ought to try to see that your point of view about him is a prejudiced—a natural one, but still——"
"Is it a definite offer, Eleanor?"
"Yes, absolutely, though the papers are not to be signed for a day or so."
Lydia breathed in thoughtfully "A day or so," and Eleanor pressed on.
"It isn't that I care what you think of him or he of you. I'm past that with my friends, and, as I say, I don't see nearly as much of him as I used to; but——"
"Of course you don't," answered Lydia. "He's ashamed—or, no, it's more that he can't bear to see himself in contrast with your perfect integrity, Eleanor. Did you know that he came to prison to see me, to gloat over me? Sent in for me to come to him in my prison clothes——"
Lydia's breath quickened as she spoke of the outrage.
"He didn't come to gloat over you."
"What did he come for then?"
To her own surprise Eleanor heard her own voice saying, as if unaided it tapped some source of knowledge never before open to her, "Because you know very well, Lydia, the man's in love with you."
Lydia sprang forward like a cat.
"Never say such a thing as that again!" she said. "You don't understand, but it degrades me, it pollutes me! Love me! That man! I'd kill him if I thought he dared!"
Nothing rendered Eleanor so calm as excitement in others.
"Well," she said, "perhaps I'm mistaken," and appeared to let the matter drop; but the other would not have it.
"Of course you're mistaken! But you must have had some reason for saying such a thing. You're not the kind of person, Eleanor, who goes about having disgusting suspicions like that without a reason."
"Do you really want me to give you a reason or are you only waiting to tear me to pieces, whatever I say?"
Lydia sat down and caught her hands between her knees, determined to be good.
"I want your reason," she said.
Reasons were not so easy, Eleanor found. She spoke slowly.
"I saw all through your trial that Dan was not like himself, that he was struggling with something stronger than he. He is a man who has always had terrible weaknesses, temptations——"
"He drinks," said Lydia, and there was a note of almost boastful triumph in her tone.
"No"—Eleanor was very firm about it—"in recent years only once."
"More than once, Eleanor."
"Only once, in a time of emotional strain. What was the emotion? You had just been sentenced. It came to me suddenly that if he were in love with you—it would explain everything."
"If he hated me—that would explain it too."
"The two emotions are pretty close, Lydia."
"Close?" Lydia exclaimed violently. "It shows that you have never felt either."
"Have you?"
"Yes, I've felt hate. It's poisoned and withered me for over two years now, and I don't mean to bear it any more. I mean to get rid of it this way—to hurt that man enough to satisfy myself."
Eleanor rose slowly, and the two women stood a little apart, looking at each other. Then Eleanor said, "You'll never get rid of it that way. Don't do it, Lydia, whatever you mean to do."
"You're pleading for that man, Nell. Don't! It's ignominious."
"I'm pleading for you, my dear."
"Don't! It's impertinent."
Worse than either, Eleanor knew it was useless. Her motor was waiting for her and she went away. For the first time she understood something that Dorset had once said to her—that Lydia in her evil moods was the most pathetic figure in the world.
CHAPTER XVIII
Before the lights went up on the first entr'acte Lydia retreated to the little red-lined box of an anteroom and sank down on the red-silk sofa. She and Miss Bennett had come alone to the opera; but Dorset and Albee, who was committed to some sort of political dinner first, were to join them presently.
Even while the house was still in darkness Lydia had recognized the outline of O'Bannon's head in a box across the house. She had seen it before she had seen Eleanor. Miss Bennett had stayed in the front of the box. Lydia was glad she had. She wanted to be alone while she waited. She could see her between the curtains, sweeping the house with her opera glasses.
The door of the box opened and Albee came in. She did not speak, but looking up at him every muscle in her body grew tense with interest. He smiled at her and began to hang up his hat and take off his coat. She couldn't bear the suspense.
"Well?" she asked sternly.
"It's all right. The governor will sign it. It's only been pressure of business——"
She interrupted him.
"And the other thing? Have you failed there?" Somehow she had never thought of his failing. What should she do if he had?
He made a quick pass with his right hand, indicating that O'Bannon had been obliterated.
"Our friend will never be a partner in that firm," he said.
He looked at her eagerly and got his reward. She smiled at him, slowly wagging her head at the same time, as if he were too wonderful for words.
"Stephen, you are superb," she said, and evidently felt it. "Does he know it yet?"
"No, he won't know it until he opens his mail to-morrow morning."
Lydia leaned forward and peered out into the house between the curtains. Then she turned back and smiled again, but this time with amusement.
"He's over there now with Eleanor, pleased to death with himself and thinking the world is his oyster."
Albee had been standing. Now as the lights began to sink for the opening of the second act he gave an exclamation of annoyance.
"I have something to show you," he said. He sat down beside her on the narrow little sofa, and lowering his voice to fit the lowered lights he whispered, "What would you give for a copy of Simpson's letter withdrawing his partnership offer?"
"You have it?" Her voice betrayed that she would give anything.
"What would you give me for it?" he murmured, and in the darkness he put his arms about her and tried to draw her to him.
"I won't give you a thing!" Her voice was like steel, and so was her body.
Albee's heart failed him. It seemed as if his arms were paralyzed. He did not dare do what he had imagined himself doing—crushing her to him whether she consented or not. He suddenly thought to himself that she was capable of making an outcry.
"The inhuman, unfeminine creature!" he thought, even as he still held her.
He felt her put out her hand and quietly take the letter from him. No, that was a little too much! He caught her wrist and held it firmly. Then the door opened, someone came in, Bobby's voice said, "Are you here, Lydia?"
"Yes," said Lydia in her sweetest, most natural tone. "Turn on the light, Bobby, or you'll fall over something. It's just there on your right."
It took Bobby a moment to find the switch. When he turned on the light he saw Lydia and Albee sitting side by side on the sofa. Lydia was holding a folded paper in her hand.
"What's the point of sitting in here when the act is on?" said Bobby. "Let's go in and see her vamp the strong man."
Lydia sprang up, and looking at Albee deliberately tucked away the paper in the front of her low dress.
"Turn out the light again Bobby," she said. "It shines between the curtains and disturbs me."
All three went back to the box, where Miss Bennett had been sitting alone. It was a long time since Lydia had heard any music, and the music of the second act of Samson and Delilah, the long sweeping chords on the harp, began to trouble her, as the coming thunderstorm seemed to be troubling Delilah.
Her long abstraction from any artistic impression made her as susceptible as a child. The moonlight flooded her with a primitive glamour, her nerves crept to the music of the incredibly sweet duet; and when at last Samson followed Delilah into her house Lydia felt as if the soprano's triumph were her own.
As the storm broke Albee rose. He bent over Miss Bennett and then over Lydia.
"Good night, Delilah," he whispered.
She did not answer, but she thought, "Not to your Samson, Stephen Albee."
He was gone and she still had the letter. When the act was over she went back to the anteroom to read it. Yes, there it was on Simpson, Aspinwall & McCarter's heavy, simple stationery—clear and unequivocal. Mr. Simpson regretted so much that conditions had arisen which made it imperative——
Lydia glanced across the house and caught O'Bannon laughing at something that Eleanor was saying to him. She smiled. Whatever the joke was, she thought she knew a better one.
"How lovely you look, Lydia," said Bobby, seeing the smile. "Almost like a madonna in that white stuff—like a madonna painted by an Apache Indian."
"Have you anything that I could write on Bobby—a scrap of paper?"
Bobby tore out a page from a cherished address book and gave it to her with a gold pencil from his watch chain. She stood under the light, pressing the top of the pencil against her lips. Then she wrote rapidly:
"I have something of importance to say to you. Will you meet me in the lobby on the Thirty-ninth Street side at the end of the performance and let me drive you home?
"Lydia Thorne."
She folded it and held it out.
"Will you take that to O'Bannon and get an answer from him?"
"To O'Bannon?" said Bobby. "Has anything happened?"
"Don't bother me now, Bobby, there's a dear. Just take it." She half shoved him out of the box. "And be as quick as you can," she called after him.
He really was quick. In a few seconds she saw the curtain of the opposite box pushed aside and Bobby enter. He spoke a moment to Eleanor, and then when no one else was watching she saw him speak to O'Bannon and give him her note. The two men rose and went together into the back of the box out of her sight. What was happening? Was O'Bannon now on his way to her? There was a long delay. Miss Bennett's voice called, "Is somebody knocking?" The noise was Lydia's restless feet tapping on the floor. Just as the lights began to go down Bobby returned—alone. He handed her a note.
"Dear Miss Thorne: I cannot drive home with you, but I will stop at your house for a few minutes about half-past eleven or a quarter to twelve, if that is not too late.
"D. O'B."
Lydia smiled again. This was better still. She would have plenty of time in her own drawing-room to reveal the facts in any way she liked. She hardly heard the music of the next theme, hardly enjoyed the spectacle of Samson's degradation, so absorbed was she in the anticipation of the coming interview.
During the ballet in the last scene she saw Eleanor rise and O'Bannon follow her. She sprang up at once, though Miss Bennett faintly protested.
"Oh, aren't you going to wait to see him pull down the temple? It's such fun." Miss Bennett liked to see masculine strength conquer. Lydia shook her head, but offered no explanation.
It was almost half past eleven when they entered the house. Miss Bennett, who had been yawning on the drive home, walked straight to the staircase. Morson had delegated his duties for the evening to the parlor maid, a young Swede, and she began industriously drawing the bolts of the front door and preparing to put out the lights. Lydia stopped her.
"Get me a glass of water, will you, Frieda?" she said.
"There'll be one in your room, dear," Miss Bennett called back, every inch the housekeeper. She did not stop, however, but went on up and disappeared round the turn in the stairs.
When the girl came back Lydia said, "Frieda, I'm expecting a gentleman in a few minutes. After you've let him in you need not wait up. Is the fire lit in the drawing-room? Then light it, please."
She stood for a moment, sipping at the long, cool glass and listening to hear Miss Bennett's footsteps growing more and more distant; listening, too, for a footstep in the street.
In the drawing-room the firelight was already leaping up, outdoing the light of the shaded lamps. Left alone, Lydia slipped off her opera cloak very softly, as if she did not want to make the smallest noise that would interfere with her listening. The house was quiet, and even the noise of the city was beginning to die down. The steady roar of traffic returning from the theater was almost over. Now and then she could hear a Fifth Avenue bus rolling along on its heavy rubber tires; now and then the slamming of a motor door as some of her neighbors returned from an evening's amusement.
She bent over the fire trying to warm her hands. They were like ice, and it must have been from cold, not excitement, she thought, for her mind felt as calm as a well. She turned the little clock—all lilac enamel and rhinestones—so that she could watch it's tiny face. It was a quarter to twelve. She clenched her hands. Did he intend to keep her waiting?
She started, for the door had softly opened. Miss Bennett entered in one of her gorgeous dressing gowns of crimson satin and bright-blue birds.
"Dear child," she said, "you ought to be in bed."
"I'm waiting for someone who's coming to see me, Benny; and as he may be here at any minute, and I don't suppose you want to be caught in your present costume——"
Miss Bennett lifted her shoulders.
"Oh, at my age!" she said. "After all, what is the use of having lovely dressing gowns if no one ever sees them?"
"It's Dan O'Bannon that's coming," said Lydia, "and I want to see him alone."
"O'Bannon coming here! But, Lydia, you can't see him alone—at this hour. Why, it's midnight!"
Miss Bennett's eyes clung to her.
"Eleven minutes to," said Lydia, with her eyes on the clock. "I wish you'd go, Benny."
Miss Bennett hesitated.
"I don't think you ought to see him alone. I don't think it's quite—quite nice."
"Oh, this is going to be very nice!"
"No, I mean I don't think it's safe. Suppose anything should happen."
"Should happen?" said Lydia, and for a moment she looked like the old haughty Lydia. "What could happen?"
Miss Bennett raised both her arms and let them drop with a gesture quite French, expressing that they both knew what men were.
"He might try to make love to you," she said.
The minute she had spoken she wished she had not, for Lydia's fine dark brow contracted.
"What disgusting ideas you do have Benny! That man!" She stopped herself. "I almost wish he would. If he did I think I should kill him."
To Miss Bennett this seemed just an expression; but to Lydia, with her eyes fixed on an enormous pair of steel-and-silver scissors that lay on the writing table, it was something more than a phrase.
Miss Bennett decided to withdraw.
"Stop in my room when you come up," she said. "I shan't close my eyes till you do." Then gathering her shining draperies about her she left the room.
Even after Miss Bennett had gone her suggestion remained with Lydia. Would that man have any such idea? Would he think her sending for him at such an hour had any flattering significance? Or would he see that it was proof of her utter contempt for him—of her belief that she was his superior, the master mind of the two, whatever their situation? As for love-making—let him try it! Her blow would be all the more effective if it could be delivered while he was on his knees.
With an absurd, hurried, tingling stroke the little clock struck midnight. Strange, she thought, that waiting for something certain stretched the nerves more than uncertainty. She knew O'Bannon would come—or did she? Would he dare do that? Leave her sitting waiting for him and never come at all? Undoubtedly he had taken Eleanor back to her hotel. Were they laughing together over her note?
At that instant she heard the distant buzz of the front doorbell. Every nerve in her body vibrated at the sound. Then the drawing-room door opened and closed behind O'Bannon.
The fly had walked into the parlor, she said to herself—a great big immaculately attired fly. Seeing him there before her all her nervousness passed away, and she was conscious of nothing but joy—a joy as inspiring as if it were founded on something holier than hatred; joy that at last her moment had come.
She waited a second for his apology, and then she said quite in the manner of a great lady who without complaining is conscious of what is due to her, "You're late."
"I walked up," he said. "It's a lovely night."
"You have wondered why I sent for you?"
"Of course."
She sank lazily into a chair by the fire.
"Sit down," she said graciously, as if she were according the privilege to an old servant who might hesitate otherwise.
He shook his head.
"No," he answered; "I can't stay but a minute. It's after twelve."
He leaned his elbow on the mantelpiece and took up the jade dog that stood there, examining its polished surfaces. Lydia was well content with this arrangement. It made her feel more at ease. She let a silence fall, and in the silence he raised his eyes from the dog and looked at her as if he were reluctant to do so.
He said, "I'm glad to see you here—back in your normal surroundings."
Thank heaven she did not have to be dovelike any more.
"Oh, are you?" she said derisively. "Didn't you enjoy your little visit to me in prison?"
He shook his head slowly.
"Then may I ask why you came?"
"I don't think I shall tell you that."
"Do you think I don't know?" she asked with a sudden fierceness.
"I really haven't thought whether you knew or not."
"You came to get just what you did get—the full savor of the humiliation of my position."
"My God," he answered coolly, "and they say women have intuition!"
His tone, as much as his words, irritated her, and she did not want to be irritated. She raised her chin.
"It doesn't really matter why you came, at least not to me. Let me tell you why I sent for you to-night."
But he was pursuing his own train of thought and did not seem to hear her.
"Are you able to come back into life again? Are you"—he hesitated—"are you happy?"
"No. But then I never was very happy. I can tell you this: I wouldn't exchange my prison experience for anything in my whole life. You gave me something, Mr. O'Bannon, when you sent me to prison, that no one else was ever able to give me, not even my father, though he tried. I mean a sense of the consequences of my own character. That's the only aspect of punishment that is of use to people."
His eyes lit up.
"You don't mean you're grateful to me!" he said.
"No, not grateful," she answered, and a little smile began to curve the corners of her mouth. "Not grateful to you, because, you see, I am going to return the obligation—to do the same kind deed to you."
"To me? I don't believe I understand."
"I don't believe you do. But be patient. You will. During my trial, I imagine—in fact I was told by your friends—that you took the position that you were treating me as you treated any criminal whose case you prosecuted."
"What other stand could I take?"
"Oh, officially none. But in your mind you must have known you had another motive. Some people think it was a young man's natural thirst for headlines, but I know—and I want you to know I know it—that it was your personal vindictiveness toward me."
"Don't say that!" he interrupted sharply.
"I shall say it," Lydia went on, "and to you, because you are the only person I can say it to. Oh, you knew very well how it would be! I have to sit silent while Eleanor tells me how noble your motives were in prosecuting me. You know—oh, you are so safe in knowing—that I will not tell anyone that your hatred of me goes back to that evening when I did not show myself susceptible to your fascinations when you tried to kiss me, and I——"
"I did kiss you," said O'Bannon.
"I believe you did, but——"
"You know I did."
She sprang up at this.
"And is that something you're proud of, something it gives you satisfaction to remember?"
"The keenest."
She stamped her foot.
"That you kissed a woman against her will? Held her in your arms because you were physically stronger? You like to remember——"
"It was not against your will," he said.
"It was!"
"It was not!" he repeated. "Do you think I haven't been over that moment often enough to be sure of what happened? You were not angry! You were glad I took you in my arms! You would have been glad if I had done it earlier!"
"Liar!" said Lydia. "Liar and cad—to say such a thing!" She was shivering so violently that her teeth chattered like a person in an ague. "If you knew—if you could guess the repugnance, the horror of a woman embraced by a man she loathes and despises! Her flesh creeps! There are no words for it! And then—then to be told by that man's mad vanity that she liked it, that she wanted it, that she brought it on herself——"
"Just wait a moment," he said. "I believe that you hate me now all right, whatever you felt then."
"I do, I do hate you," she answered, "and I have the power of proving it. I can do you an injury."
"You will always have the power of injuring me."
"Be sure I will use it."
"I dare say you will."
"I have. I haven't wasted any time at all."
"What is all this about? What have you done?" he asked without much interest.
She drew the letter out of the front of her dress and handed it to him with a hand that trembled so much it made the folded paper rattle. He took it, unfolded it, read it. Watching him, she saw no change in his face until he looked up and smiled.
"Is this it?" he asked. "A lot I care about that—not to go into the Simpson firm! You don't understand your power. The things that would have made me suffer—well, if you had let prison break you, if you had given your love to that crooked politician who came down to bribe me on your behalf——Why, when you fell at my feet in the reception room at Auburn I suffered more than in all my life before or since, because I love you."
"Stop!" said Lydia. "Don't dare say that to me!"
"I love you," he said. "You don't have to go about looking for things like this," and he flicked the letter contemptuously into the fire. "You make me suffer just by existing."
"I won't listen to you!" said Lydia, and she moved away.
"Of course you'll listen to me," he answered, standing between her and the door. "There isn't one thing you've done since I first saw you that has given me the slightest pleasure or peace or happiness—nothing but unrest and pain. When you're hard and bitter I suffer, and when you're gentle and kind——"
She gave a sort of laugh at this.
"When have you ever seen me gentle and kind?" she asked.
"Oh, I know how wonderfully you could give yourself to a man if you loved him."
"Don't say such things!" she said, actually shuddering. "It sickens me! Don't even think them!"
"Think! Good God, the things I think!"
"Don't even think of me at all except as your relentless enemy. If it were true what you just said now, that you love me——"
"It is true."
"I hope it is. It gives me more power to hurt you. It must make it worse for you to know how I hate, how I despise you, everything about you; your using your looks and your fine figure to hypnotize simple people like Eleanor and Miss Bennett and poor Evans; the vanity that makes you hate me for being free of your charms; and all the petty, underhanded things you did in the trial; all your sentimental buncombe with the poor little Wooley girl; and your twisting the law—the law that you are supposed to uphold—in order to get that bracelet before the jury; your mouthing and your cheap arts with the jury; and most of all your coming to Auburn to feast your eyes on my humiliation. Oh, if I could forgive all the rest I could never forgive you that!"
"I'm not particularly eager that you should forgive me," he said.
To her horror she found that the breaking down of the barriers which had kept her all these months from rehearsing her grievances to anyone was breaking down her self-control. She knew she was going to cry.
"You can go now," she said. She made a sweeping gesture toward the door. Already the muscles in her throat were beginning to contract. He stood looking into the fire as if he had not heard her. She stamped her foot. "Don't you understand me?" she said. "I want you to go."
"I'm going, but there's something I want to say to you." He was evidently trying to think something out in words.
"I shall never have anything more to say to you," she replied.
She sank down on the sofa and leaned her head back among the cushions. She closed her eyes to keep back her tears, and sat rigid with the struggle. If she did not speak again—and she wouldn't—she might get rid of him before the storm broke. He took a cigarette and lit it. Even New York was silent for a minute, and the little clock on the table succeeded in making audible its faint, quick ticking. Lydia became aware that tears were slowly forcing their way under her lids, that she was swallowing audibly. She put her hands against her mouth in the effort to keep back a sob. And O'Bannon began to speak, without looking at her.
"I don't know whether I can make you understand," he said. "I don't know that it matters whether you understand or not, but in your whole case I did exactly what a district attorney ought to do, only it is true that behind my doing it——"
He was stopped by a sob.
"Yes, yes!" she said fiercely, her whole face distorted with emotion, "it's true I'm crying, but if you come near me I'll kill you."
"I won't," he answered. "Cry in peace."
She took him at his word. She cried, not peacefully but wildly. She flung herself face downward on the sofa and sobbed, with her head buried in the cushions, while her whole body shook. She had not cried like this since she was a little child. It was a wild luxurious abandonment of all self-control. Once she heard O'Bannon move.
